UBRARY OF CONGRESS 





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"Going On Me Own." 



THE TRIFLING 
SUMMER 
ADVENTURES 
OF A WOMAN 
ABROAD. 



BY ^' , 

/ 



ESTHER CHADDOCK DAVENPORT. 



"In our course through life we shall 
meet the people who are coming to meet 
us from many strange places and by 
many strange roads, and what is set to 
us to do to them, and what is set to them 
to do to us, will all be done." 



Buffalo, N. Y. 

The Matthews-Northrup Co. 

M c M. 



ruibpsury of Cono»^«« 

pvfo Cyptu Ktctirfto 

I NOV 2 1900 

SECOND COPY. 
0«9tW DIVISION, 

L-Nfly P>n 1^00 



Copyright, 1900, by 
Esther Chaddock Davenport. 



All Rights Reserved. 




^%k 



h a.4 s 



to my beloved daughter, 

Ada Louise Kendall, 

WHO has shared the fortunes of my life, 

SUCH AS they have BEEN, THIS 
BOOK IS INSCRIBED. 



Cbe Chapters. 



PAGE. 



Going Abroad, 9 

Antwerp to Paris, 16 

A Visit to the Exposition, 25 

A Day of Sight-seeing in Paris, . 38 

A Visit to the Louvre, . 46 

France's National Fete, 53 

A Drive About Paris, 59 

A Day at Versailles, 67 

A Day at Fontainebleau, 74 

From Paris to London, 83 

A Day at Kew Gardens, 88 

London Finery, 93 

Down the Thames, 99 

Up the Thames, 107 

Westminster and its Neighbors, 113 

London Parks, 122 

The Queen's Stables, 130 

A Last Day in London, 136 

To Antwerp by the Harwich Boat, 146 

The Voyage Home, 156 




[HERE is one universal experience 6ot11^ 
in going abroad, and that is in Hbl'O^d* 
parting from the shore — over 
and over is the scene repeated 
— the stern of the outgoing ves- 
sels crowded with men, women 
and children, faces shoreward, eyes misted with 
tears, hands waving handkerchiefs, flags and 
flowers to another throng of men, women and 
children leaning out from the pier, similarly em- 
ployed in weeping and waving good-byes. 

Those who spare themselves this parting pang 
by saying their farewells at home, miss something, 
— something sadly sweet — those on shore the 
sadness of looking on 

*' Tlie last glint reddening on the sail 
That sinks with those they love beneath the verge." 

For the outward-bound, there's the music, sad, 
but sweet, of voices beloved, mingling their part- 
ing cadence with the lapping of the waves that 
idly wait to bear the ship away ; the pressure of a 
hand that may clasp yours on earth no more; a 
kiss that may seal a parting that takes hold of 
eternity. 

9 



However much ocean travel is belittled by those 
who *' cross the pond," or **run over to Paris," 
most people realize that there are perils by sea, 
and that the brief days of its voyaging may stand 
as much for time as do unrelenting years, when 
those left behind fall under the hand of sickness 
and death. 

All this surges over you with peculiar pain at 
that last moment, when you see the ropes thrown 
off, the bridge taken in, and the rift begins between 
the boat and land. 

The din of horns and whistles, the creaking of 
the ship as she rounds once more for a foreign 
shore turn the attention inward, and life on ship- 
board has begun. There is the settling into state- 
rooms, the looking after baggage, the bustle in 
the saloon, where letters, telegrams, flowers and 
fruits await the passengers, those last loving 
reminders of home and friends. There are letters 
to write, to send in return by the pilot, there's the 
second steward to interview as to table sitting, and 
deck steward as to location of steamer chair, and 
above all, in duty to one's self, there's the beautiful 
New York bay to view critically, remembering 
that when your eyes rest on it again your gaze will 

10 



be so filled with tender lovingness that they will 
scarcely do full justice to its natural and con- 
structed beauty. 

Acquaintanceship is easily begun on shipboard 
— proximity at table, the rubbing arms of steamer 
chairs perform the first introductions ; accident, 
fate, affinity and whim do the rest. For diversion, 
there is shovelboard, cards, light skimming of 
light books and friendly gossip. 

Mai de mer has little vogue, the one or two 
who fall under its spell receiving only pitying 
contempt for their pains. A ship on the horizon 
is a thing for everybody to see, and when one 
steams up on the starboard, and sends up its rock- 
ets, scarcely a minute elapses before the ship's 
side tips with the weight of the passengers. 

A single small whale, spouting water, keeps up, 
in feeble fashion, the legend of the sea, and flying 
fish play about the bow, with over-flying Mother 
Carey's chickens to keep the sailors cheer. 

Your cabin steward is devotion itself; your 
table waiter, Franz, will, on request, bring you 
the moon on a salver ; and Peter, the deck stew- 
ard — well, every woman on the passenger list 
knows exactly how many children he has waiting 

II 



for him in Antwerp, and that he has a good wife, 
and is paying for a little home. 

Your ship has so timed its voyage that the 
Fourth of July finds you in mid-ocean, and good 
Capt. Kinne must have had his sailors climbing 
ropes the whole night previous by the appearance 
of the masts and ship's rigging on the morn- 
j^ ing of our National holiday. Hundreds of flags 
flutter in the breeze, those of the United States 
and Belgium entwined at the bow, and from the 
topmast floats the Stars and Stripes, emblem of 
home and country, than which there is none more 
blessed nor greater the wide world over. 

The saloon is draped with flags, and the chef 
outdoes all previous efforts in the way of menus, 
by providing creme, George Washington ; Kenebec 
salmon a la McKinley ; Pommes, Lafayette ; Toma- 
* toes a la Yorktown; Philadelphia chicken a la 
Roosevelt ; Asparages, Bunker Hill ; with entrees 
and dessert equally historic and patriotic. And the 
wonderful dishes and pyramids of pastry and con- 
fections which are served and ornament the table 
do honor to the renowned names they bear. 

A little company of men and women arrange a 
programme for the evening, the proceeds of which 

12 



will swell the coffers of the Sailors', Widows* and 
Orphans' Fund. Mrs. Edward Everett Parker of 
Alton Place, Brookline, Mass., takes the lead, 
assisted by Prof. C. H. Dempsey, superintendent 
of education up in Vermont, and who is going 
abroad for the summer as conductor of one of the ^ 
touring companies, his party chiefly made up of 
charming young women gathered together from all 
over the States, among them two or three young 
Southern girls who do their vowels after the regu- 
lar London fashion. 

Judge John M. Connors of Cincinnati, abroad for 
rest and recreation, is the master of ceremonies, 
and his bosom friend and traveling companion, 
Maj. Van Dyke, is really the star of the perform- 
ance, with his reminiscences of the Civil War. * 

Herr Schumann is up, by special request, from 
the steerage, where, on the Sunday night previous, 
some of the women had heard him singing at 
twilight. The violin duet by M. Soutter and 
Madame, his wife, is exquisitely rendered, he, an 
artist of some repute in the West, going home to 
his beloved Alsace-Loraine with his beautiful 
young wife to spend the summer. With the sing- 
ing of America the saloon musicale breaks up, and 

13 



everybody goes on deck to see the illuminations 
of the masts and the fireworks sent up from the 
stern of the boat. 

Gaiety once begun is not easily ended, and on 
the following evening, as a climax to the ship's 
merry-making, Capt. Kinne gives a ball, the deck 
being enclosed with canvas, draped with flags and 
illuminated with Chinese lanterns. One of the 
sailors plays the dance music, and young and old 
dance with spirit the old-fashioned quadrilles and 
Virginia reel, New England dames and Southern 
gallants tripping the ** light fantastic" for the 
first time in a score of years. 

And then, little by little, evidences of the shore 
come back. The pilot comes out to meet the 
ship, and to take her safely into port. The num- 
ber of passing ships increases; fishing boats, all 
red and green, with tan-colored sails, go by, car- 
rying supplies to the boats lying out on the banks ; 
steamers and merchantmen come up from the 
verge until the whole rim of the horizon is fringed 
with masts and sails, and the sea all about you is 
filled with boats. The gulls come off the coast of 
England to meet the boat and fly at its sides and 
front. The Cliffs of Dover loom in sight — 

14 



standing straight up from the sea, and above are 
the fortifications and the white chalky roadways 
winding off to nothingness in the distance. 

At early candlelight, Dover itself borders the 
water's edge at the left, presenting a front of 
small-paned windows, as if the town kept watch 
for some one, and behind each pane a candle 
burns to guide the wanderer. ' ' The Silent 
City," you call it, as you idly lean over the ship's 
rail and speculate on the joys and sorrows of the 
men and women who keep the lights burning. 

On past Flushing at midnight, where the letters 
are sent off for home. Up the Scheldt. Red- 
roofed thatched cottages and quaint old windmills 
deepen and set off the emerald green of its beauti- 
ful shore. The cattle come down to the water's 
edge and browse in the luscious grass in placid 
indifference to the passing ship. Steamer clothes 
are replaced by street toilets, women exchange 
cards and make false promises of ** writing," 
men cut short the mild flirtations of the ship and 
stand girded for what lies beyond. 

The cathedral tower of Anvers comes in sight, 
at last the quay, and once more the boat touches 
the land and sight-seeing in Europe has begun. 

15 




fvotn |BiH>IjB<»SNTWERP on a Sunday morning 

HlltWCVp to |f5^ Z^/fj offers many attractions to strang- 
Vy^YlQ K^?^ wtA ^^^' ^^^^ ^^^ cathedral and church 

bells clanging the hour of wor- 
ship, its parks, gardens and 
places of interest open for in- 
spection ; and the ' ' Westernland ' ' of the Red 
Star Line, arriving on the morning of Sunday, 
July 8th, is in exact time for all of this. 

A slight detention on the wharf, where there's 
a baggage stand for every letter in the alphabet, 
and where the custom officers are chiefly on the 
lookout for tobacco and alcohol, is the last barrier 
between yourself and this foreign land you have 
come so far to see; and this passed, men and 
women put aside the gentle amenities of the ship, 
and even she who had said of a rival leader on 
shipboard, "She is a well-preserved, venerable 
old ruin," sets out with smiling face to explore 
the ruins and wonders of Europe. 

The Grand Hotel, the Queen's, St. Antoine's 
and every other hostelry in the city are filled to 
their last room ; even the little Polish inn swarms 
to the curb with the steerage passengers, decently 
attired and wholly unlike the idle, untidy congre- 

i6 



gation of men, women and children you have 
seen for the last ten days, lying about on the 
steerage deck. The very latest to arrive comes in 
tears. A young girl going home to relatives in 
Lomsha, Poland, in charge of guardians who, 
either intentionally or carelessly, have left her on 
the wharf. Here she is found weeping bitterly 
and forlornly, by one of the cabin passengers, who 
nearly misses her train for Paris through running 
about from hotel to hotel in search of the careless 
care-takers, at last coming upon them and restor- 
ing to them their pitiful charge. 

She herself — the Samaritan — is not above 
needing sympathy, and that of the tenderest. 

She is going home for the second time, from 
service in America, — ' * going home second class 
to her mother in Basel, Switzerland," she tells 
you, — going home because her father is dead and 
to see if now, that his oppression is lifted off her 
mother's heart, and she, herself, will no more feel 
the pain of his harshness, she may not find some 
congeniality and warmth in the place she calls 
home and where since she can remember she has 
known only fear and repression. She speaks 
French, German and English with a proficiency 

17 



that shows that she is reaching toward her ideals. 
You see your last of her on the platform of the 
station in Paris, where she is waiting in patient 
resignation the arrival of tardy relatives whom 
she has advised by telegram at Antwerp of her 
coming. 

There are others who do not loiter in Antwerp, 
for Paris lies beyond. From Antwerp to Paris is 
a delightful half day's journey on a peaceful, 
sunny Sunday afternoon, particularly if there has 
been rain the preceding night. 

The well-tilled fields lie like glorious pictures, 
spread out to view, filled in with red-roofed 
cottages and villas, white walled or quaintly 
bricked and staffed. The gently undulating land 
is covered with growing crops, so varied in tint 
and hue, so evenly laid out in narrow strips, that 
they look like widths of ribbon rolled out for the 
eyes' enravishment. The pale green of oats and 
growing peas, the deeper tints of potatoes, the 
browns of ripened meadow grass, the yellow of 
golden grain, are all spread out, with now and 
then a flaming sheet of poppies, red with a dye 
that only Nature mixes to perfection. 

* *A city set on a hill, ' ' is your first thought on 

i8 



first coming in sight of Paris, and from its sum- 
mit the Eiffel Tower points heavenward. 

Gay and pleasure-loving Paris, how quickly 
one may begin within thy boundaries to make 
themselves at home — a part of thee ! What 
avenues of learning and enjoyment, what visions 
of achievement and satisfaction lie outstretched in 
thy open hand ! Familiar as the face of a friend, 
a part of all we know of art, history and letters, 
a place where worldly fame and glory have run 
riot and where tragedy has had its blackest 
setting, Paris holds even for the stranger that 
welcome and promise which no other city among 
the cities of the world can give. 

Whoever goes to Paris with the expectation of 
viewing the fashions in the streets will be dis- 
appointed, for aside from the fashionable avenues 
at fashionable hours, one may look in vain for the 
fluffs and modes that are generally believed to be 
the natural inheritance of French women. 

Four things are conspicuous in the attire of the 
majority of French women seen on the streets of 
Paris — the shirt waist or some other kind of a 
waist, a draggled skirt, a belt and a safety pin, 
and there is invariably, an utter absence of that 

19 



secret, invisible and confidential union of the 
four, which the variest drab at home considers 
imperative ere she ventures forth. 

Indeed, after Paris and the average thoroughfares 
in London, one is first struck on coming home 
with the perfection of street costuming arrived at 
by our women, especially women who crowd the 
cars and fill the streets early in the morning and at 
the closing hour of daily business, wage-earners, 
women showing their self-respect in their well-fit- 
ting, well-chosen, clean and suitable clothing. 

One may, however, see clothes in Paris, and 
no time, nor place, nor way, is better suited than 
with a friend to drive in the Champs Elysees and 
Bois de Boulogne at the fashionable hour from four 
to seven o'clock, especially if your companion rides 
half of the time with his head uncovered, bowing 
and calling by name the occupants of the passing 
equipages. There' re the Count and Countess of 
Castellane — Anna Gould — monsieur has just 
pointed out their beautiful new residence at the 
meeting place of the Elysees and the Bois. She is in 
lavender with a heavy black ruching about the 
neck to match her black hat. There' re President 
Loubet in a carriage with four, and Mr. and Mrs. 

20 



Potter Palmer, Mr. Thomas Walsh and family, 
the New York commissioner ; and the De Youngs, 
who have been greatly in vogue in Paris this year. 

In most ravishing toilets, with great feathery 
boas of ostrich feathers — everybody wears boas 
in Paris — dresses of most exquisite transparencies, 
are the commediennes and popular actresses, 
Bernhardt among them; and last, but not least, 
the Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, riding down the 
avenue with some young relatives he is visiting in 
Kleber Street, in anything but a smart turnout, 
slouching a little in his seat, as if the Champs 
Elysees is very ''small potatoes," and any kind 
of an American style does it honor. 

A drive in the Champs Elysees should never be 
taken without stopping once or twice at the cafes 
of the Bois de Boulogne for a glass of white wine 
if given to drink, like madame, or if temperate, 
like monsieur, a bottle of Scheweppees, which 
pretty nearly everybody drinks all the time in 
Paris. 

There are other kinds of folk than fashionables 
to see on a Paris Sunday afternoon, and the Bird 
and Dog markets afford the very best possible 
place for seeing them; monsieur is up to his 

21 



French and something beside, and makes his way 
easily from stand to stand calling old and young 
"mademoiselle" — thereby winning from tooth- 
less old crones smiles, that having once seen you 
will not be likely to forget in a life-time, and 
from the young women, smiles which must go a 
little way to pay monsieur, himself, for his gal- 
lantry. Both old and young do a thriving busi- 
ness on Sunday, and as every woman in Paris has 
at least one dog, the dog market is steady. 

Of the shops in Paris, this year, there has been 
but one opinion expressed by American women, 
and that is, that we can buy at less cost quite as 
beautiful fabrics, gowns, mantles and hats at 
home ; and, too, if oile were not of an exploring 
nature, one might never arrive at what the shops 
really do contain, so very inferior to our own 
are the Paris ways of dressing windows and dis- 
playing goods. A half dozen of our Buffalo 
shops displayed in the spring Paris hats quite as 
handsome and at less cost than could be found in 
Paris. This fact is coming to be understood by 
our women, and it accounts for so many of them 
coming home this year with their * ' imported ' ' 
dresses and hats to buy in Buffalo. 

22 



Since the opening of the fair Paris has been 
full of Americans, New York and Buffalo being 
represented by many of their most important 
citizens who have entered into, and been a part 
of the fashionable society life that has particularly 
marked the French capital this year. 

At the Hotel Regina, the beautiful new hotel 
of Paris, in rooms overlooking the garden of the 
Tuileries, Mr. Edward H. Butler has been living 
with his daughter and son. Miss Butler and Mr. 
Edward H. Butler, Jr., and his niece. Miss 
Barber. Mr. John N. Scatcherd, Pan-American 
Commissioner to Paris, has also been at the 
Regina. 

Mr. and Mrs. John Miller Horton, with their 
niece Miss Chittenden, occupied palatial rooms 
at the Continental for weeks before going to 
Aix-les-Bains. Mrs. Horton, as a member of 
the Executive Committee of the Pan-American 
Woman's Soard, and Chairman of its Reception 
Committee, received many attentions from Presi- 
dent Loubet and the New York Commissioners 
in Paris. 

Mr. Ricardo Diaz Albertini, with Mme. Alber- 
tini, have been happily situated at No. 59 Avenue 

23 



Marceau, Mme. Albertine having recently returned 
from Oberammergau and the Black Forest, where 
she was the guest of Mme. Nordica. 

Mr. Charles A. Gould and family of 714 Fifth 
Avenue, New York, owner of the Gould Coupling 
Works at Depew, have been in Paris, and his 
handsome turnout has been conspicuous all sum- 
mer among the equipages of the Champs Elysees 
and Bois de Boulogne. 

Mr. and Mrs. Frank T. Gilbert have been living 
for months with their relatives, Mr. and Mrs. 
Arthur E. Valois, at their beautiful mansion on 
the Avenue Bois de Boulogne. 

The Valois are among the social leaders and in- 
vitations to their entertainments are eagerly sought 
by both Parisians and Americans. 

A dinner given by Mr. and Mrs. Valois early 
in July in honor of Mr. Valois' confreres of the 
National Commission was one of the grand affairs 
of the season, and had for its central figures no less 
brilliant after dinner speakers than Ambassador 
Horace Porter, Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, and 
Archbishop Ireland. 



24 




NE of the questions sure to H TisCt 
be asked a Paris Exposition f^ f\y^ 
visitor is, 'Mid you ascend 6xp09iti0!l. 

the Eiffel Tower ? ' ' And it 
will not display any great 
lack of making the most of 
one's time if the answer is, 
**No, I didn't ascend the 
Eiffel, nor ride on a merry- 
go-round, nor wait my turn 
at the Ferris wheel. ' ' 

As for the Eiffel Tower, 
there are people in the world 
who think it not unlike a 
great, ugly, sprawling der- 
rick, with designs on the very 
entrails of the earth and of 
value only to the eye as a 
guide post for Paris and the 
Exposition. 

There are other guides, 
however, to be had on the 
Exposition grounds, as you 
find to your joy on a hot July 
morning — an American boy 

25 



who had worked his passage abroad in a cattle 
ship, who is living in the Latin Quartier, with a 
hard roll for breakfast, a roll and a glass of milk 
for luncheon, and cold meat for dinner. He has 
some trifling compensation for services in one of 
the departments of mechanics, and, when his mind 
isn't otherwise employed, he is worrying about 
means and ways of getting home again in time 
for the opening of school in a New Jersey city in 
September. 

In answer to your inquiry for the United States 
Pavilion, a mile away, he volunteers his services 
as a guide, and en route goes out of his course to 
point out special exhibits, his knowledge of and 
interest in everything winning your admiration. 
On reaching the Palais les Etats-Unis and asking 
the charge for his service, the boy, with his empty 
purse and his American birthright, draws back 
with the hurt dignity of a knight offered money 
for chivalry, saying : * ^ I did not come for money. 
It was a pleasure to show you the way, and I went 
round by the Worth dresses and the precious gems 
and through the navy and army departments 
because I have often longed to show them to my 
mother. ' ' 

26 



Tears come readily to the eyes at kindnesses 
received far from home. And when, after a little 
reasonable setting forth of the case and a grateful 
hand pressing into one unwilling some silver coins 
to serve as a nucleus for the home-coming fund, 
they part, the boy is swallowing a lump in his 
throat and the woman dabbing at her eyes with 
her handkerchief. 

The Paris Exposition of 1900, notwithstanding 
the adverse press criticisms, is one which will hold 
a place among the very first in the world, both 
for the beauty and construction of its buildings 
and for its extensive and magnificent display of 
the arts, mechanics and products of the civilized 
world. 

The charge of extortion, which you expect to 
meet on arrival in Paris this year, is utterly 
unwarranted. 

As for ways of getting about Paris and to the 
Exposition, they are as numerous and as conveni- 
ent and at as little cost as the mind of man can 
possibly conceive. First of all there are the fiacres, 
fifteen thousand in number, to be had a I'heure for 
two francs. From the stations one may ride in 
one of these voitures, small baggage included, 

27 



across Paris for two and one-lialf francs, and the 
price has not been raised this year on account of 
demand. People of all degrees use them, and it 
is no uncommon thing to see a housewife carrying 
home her loaf of bread and bottles of oil and 
wine, lolling back at her ease, in one of them, 
or a toothless old crone, tanned and bareheaded, 
rolling down the Rue, easing her conscience for 
her extravagance by occupying her time in knit- 
ting. 

A four-seated cab with railing for luggage is 
equally as light in its charge, and omnibuses, 
numbering like the sands of the sea, afford — 
especially outside — easy transit, at a cost from 
five to thirty centimes, many of them going to 
and returning from the gates of the Exposition. 
The Seine, too, makes delightful waterway to 
and from the grounds, its innumerable double- 
decked pleasure boats plying up and down from 
morning till night laden with Exposition visitors. 

Tickets for admission may be had of venders oti 
the streets, outside the gates and in the tobacco 
shops for only half a franc at the most, and on 
many days may be had for nine sous. Two of 
these are required for entrance before ten A. M., 

28 



and if one desires admittance after six P. M., two 
tickets also are required j on Friday evenings four 
are exacted, owing to extra illuminations and 
attractions. However, visitors who enter the 
grounds after ten in the morning and stay on 
through the evening, may do so without paying 
anything more than the first ten cents admittance. 
The grounds are in the very heart of the city, the 
Palace Trocadero, of previous Exposition fame, 
being at the entrance of the Place du Trocadero, 
and straight out beyond, across the Seine, is the 
Eiffel Tower at the entrance of the Champ de 
Mars, a guiding point to the Exposition that has 
served the stranger in Paris well for the past six 
months. 

Once inside the Exposition, you make your way 
at once to the United States pavilion, situated in 
the Avenue of the Nations, lying along the banks 
of the Seine. It is called by everybody who 
visits it "the Hall of Comfort" for two very 
good reasons : first, it is the only one of the 
national pavilions which affords seats and resting 
places for visitors, and also because of the genial- 
ity and courtesy with which the superintendent, 
Mr. Frank T. Gilbert of Buffalo, performs his 

29 



onerous and many-sided duties, admirably assisted 
by his charming wife. 

It is not very difficult to find our national pavil- 
ion, for the Stars and Stripes float above it and in 
front, facing out to the Seine, is a duplicate in 
plaster of the equestrian statue of Washington, 
erected in Paris this summer by Americans. Inside, 
the furnishings are simple but effective — floors 
covered with rugs, stairs carpeted in crimson Wil- 
ton, walls hung with tapestries and the furniture 
substantial. 

It has been the center of many social gatherings 
during the summer, most of them having a national 
and patriotic significance. 

Next to your own home building, being a true 
American, you turn first to Sousa, whose concerts, 
given every afternoon in the Esplanade des Inva- 
lides, are really nothing less than American levees 
with the most delightful music for setting. At 
these concerts, which resolve themselves into recep- 
tions, you may any day see the wives of the Na- 
tional Commissioners, the belles of society and 
Americans galore, with a comfortable sprinkling of 
French and Germans, which goes to show that 
people of other nationalities have taste. 

30 



Loie Fuller, who was so charmingly introduced 
to Buffalo society three or four years ago, is a great 
attraction at the Exposition, her private theater 
being thronged at every performance. Her ^' Fire 
Dance ' ' has given way to many new devices in 
handling the luminous and diaphanous draperies 
which clothe her, and it is generally conceded 
that Loie Fuller can do more artistic dancing 
without moving a toe, than any other woman on 
the stage can do by keeping every ligament of 
her body in motion. 

Of course, the Hall of Comfort, Sousa and even 
Loie Fuller are only fractions of the great Fair, 
but then, before one settles down to filling one's 
eyes with the wonders to be seen, it is well to fill 
one's heart with the comfort of home, one's ears 
with home music and one's eyes with something 
that one need not verify by the guide book. 

No daughter of Eve has visited the Exposition 
without seeing the costumes, and whoever sees 
them this year straightway forgives that first mother 
for bringing in clothes. ** Worth" of course is 
*' Worth," and well worth seeing, the entire dis- 
play being illuminated day and night, the better 
to get the evening effects of the delicate tints and 

31 



gorgeous jeweling, so popular with Paris modistes. 
Gowns with regal sweep and court trains made of 
the richest, heaviest silk and velvet fabrics are 
lightened and brightened by bodices filled in with 
transparencies and bouillioned with jewels set in 
net. Others are of a diaphanous texture, white 
and in the pastel hues, richly encrusted over with 
silver, crystal and gold, niching and plaiting, 
piled one above the other, with sleeveless bodices 
or with jeweled straps doing sleeve service ; visit- 
ing toilets, so overlaid with point de Venice, col- 
ored passementeries, dabs of ribbon, velvet and 
silk that one can scarcely form an opinion as to 
foundation material, represent not only the tip of 
the fashion for midsummer but presage the mode 
away into the late autumn. 

Worthy rivals fill case after case, ranged up and 
down labyrinths of space, the London exhibits, 
among them Peter Robinson's extensive display, 
as fine as any. Some very beautiful things are 
shown by the United States — indeed, in the 
made-up fur garments, our own country is in the 
lead, nothing on view equaling the very mag- 
nificent cloaks shown. 

Also, in silk fabrics, America holds a notable 

32 



place, the New Jersey mills sending on webs and 
webs of brocade, figured taffetas and satins that 
in dye and weave seem in no wise inferior to 
European manufacture. Their excellence is em- 
phasized by one immense octagonal case being 
marked **sold," the purchaser being a leading 
London house. 

In minerals, too, the American exhibit is splen- 
did, its precious stones and minerals in quality and 
quantity not being surpassed by those of any other 
nation. 

In painting and sculpture the United States 
stands second only to France, and has taken gold 
medals enough and diplomas of honor sufficient 
to swell with pride the heart of any true lover of 
the fine arts. 

Among the paintings, the American collection 
is surely the finest group of American pictures ever 
hung together, and while we owe to one or two 
men whom we can hardly now call American 
artists, notably Whistler, something of the honors 
we have received this year in Paris, still, leaving 
them out, our painters have held unchallenged 
a second place. 

Of our great painters, John S. Sargent has three 

33 



gold medals, one for the portrait of the president 
of Bryn Mawr College; and of course he has 
a woman in yellow. Whistler has as many gold 
medals, and his four or five canvases are usually 
holding a little levee of their own, particularly 
the portrait of himself crowded up in one corner, 
where the artist seems to be shrugging himself 
into the very wall in his whimsical distaste and 
silent contempt for the company of visitors who 
throng the hall. E. A. Abbey has more than one 
gold medal, one honor mark hanging on his 
*' Portrait of a Man." William M. Chase has 
one particularly beautiful canvas, gold medaled, 
the full length standing figure of a woman, dressed 
in black silk with a white embroidered, long- 
fringed China silk shawl thrown about her should- 
ers. Cecilia Beaux, whose portraits were so 
much liked here last spring at the Society of Artists' 
Exhibits, has three paintings well hung, and for 
herself a gold medal. Horatio Walker has the 
canvas which hung in the Fine Arts Academy two 
years ago, the plowman and his yoke of patient 
oxen turning up the meadow sward. William 
Holmes has a marine, gold medal marked, and 
Abbott Theyer a portrait. Alden Wier has the 

34 



portraits of two children, daughters of Senator 
Blair, that are excellent, and De Forest Brush, J. 
W. Alexander and scores more add credit to 
American artists and encourage the belief that 
some day America will have an art of her own 
that shall not depend upon men who left our shores 
in youth, and who owe to foreign training and 
foreign living their great prestige in the world of 
painting. 

In sculpture, Augustus Saint Gaudens and Fred- 
erick MacMonnies take the gold medals of honor 
next to the great Rodin of Paris ; he it is, who 
has carried off the diploma d'honneur for his 
** Equestrian Group," the central one in the 
exhibit. 

In the permanent Exposition building, the Tro- 
cadero Palace, at the entrance of the Place du 
Trocadero, M. de Quesada and his able associate 
Mr. Ricardo Diaz Albertini have charge of the 
fine Cuban Exhibit, including most of the prod- 
ucts of our new island, tobacco, alcohol and rum 
chiefly, put up in the most attractive manner, the 
glass receptacles for the liquids, — many of which 
are extracted from sugar cane, — being artistic in 
shape and of fine quality. Embroideries, beads, 

35 



necklaces, and the handiwork of women, mingle 
with the sterner stuffs to give feminine interest to 
the exhibit. A magnificent saddle, heavily mounted 
in coin silver, is the one thing that most wins your 
admiration, and Mr. Albertini tells you they keep 
the precious quality of its metal something of a 
secret. 

There are some things to see at the Paris Expo- 
sition more precious than manufactured wares, 
the faces of friends, and at one of the Exposition 
cafes a little group of Buffalonians met for dinner 
one Friday night in July, — Supt. and Mrs. Henry 
P. Emerson, Miss Ada M. Kenyon, Dr. Ida C. 
Bender, Mrs. Dickinson, Miss Lapey, Prof. Casassa 
and yourself are gathered around one table, and at 
another, a little removed, sit Mme. Casassa, Mrs. 
Cornelia Marcy Greene, and the company of in- 
teresting young girls in Mme. Casassa' s charge. 
There are no flowers and the china is thick and 
clumsy and the wine only pale claret and one orders 
by the carte with an eye to economy, but the din- 
ner is a joyous feast, friend pledging friend a deeper 
love and devotion for this meeting in a foreign land. 

Later, Mme. Casassa and her girls go by one of 
the four-wheeled voitures to the Hotel Cecil, the 

36 



Emersons go to the same destination in cabs, to pack 
their trunks for an early start to Switzerland the 
next morning, and yourself, the solitary one of the 
party, roll home alone in a fiacre at eleven o'clock, 
thinking as you breathe in the peaceful exhilarat- 
ing air of the night that solitude is not alone the 
fortune of one, for even Emerson, with all his 
theories for happy living, found that we all must 
at last **ride in a sulky," no matter how labori- 
ously we labor to recruit the friendships and loves 
that spring up for a little season and then vanish, 
each one leaving the heart more solitary than 
before. 



37 




H Day of ^^^"^JJ^JJNLY by personal experience can 
BtCfbtoecttlOf Jf /^S\ \1 non-residents of Paris form any 
In t)ai*td* If l^ji I ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ accessibility of its 

palaces, its galleries of painting 
and sculpture, its churches, mu- 
seums and gardens. 
Location is everything in Paris, and whoever 
finds herself put up in Mme. Allien' s best suite, at 
14 Rue Monsieur la Prince, may congratulate her- 
self on being in the heart of things, as well as on 
having the most comfortable, charming home, 
temporary or permanent, to be had in any pension 
in Paris. The most difficult thing about making 
one of Mme. Allieu's family is the thing itself, but 
once there and seated en famille at her daintily 
spread board, joy in Paris life begins. 

From Mme. Allieu's maison, one may toss a 
stone to the Luxembourg and its beautiful gardens, 
hitting, en route, the Odeon, where the perform- 
ances of the Theater Fran9aise, burned last March, 
are being given this year; the Pantheon stands 
near by, and quite as close in the opposite direc- 
tion is the Sorbonne, the Musee de Cluny and the 
Theater de Cluny. The Louvre and the Tuile- 
ries lie just across the Seine, and on the other side 

38 



of these palaces, the Rue de Rivoli, bordered with 
its magnificent hotels, leads into the Place de la 
Concorde, where stands the obelisk over the spot 
where Marie Antoinette bowed her regal head to 
the guillotine, and where, one and all, two thou- 
sand eight hundred men and women, conspicuous 
in French history, met death on the block. 

From the Place de la Concorde you go on into 
the Champs Elys^es, through the Arc de Triomphe, 
from which radiate the most beautiful streets in 
Paris, chief of them being the Bois de Boulogne. 
It is in this vicinity that President Loubet has his 
residence, where Mr. Valois and Mr. Thomas 
Walsh, New York commissioners, and many other 
well-known Americans dwell, as well as the old 
French families and the aristocracy of the new 
republic. 

The morning is a good time to visit the Luxem- 
bourg, entering first the gallery of sculpture, where 
among the many beautiful marbles and bronzes 
one may be able to select for remembrance the 
** Galatea," ''Persee et la Gorgone," "L'lm- 
mortalite," ^'Salammbo" (bronze), "LaSirene," 
**Eros," '^Jeannie D'Arc," <'St. Sebastian," 
**Hagar and Ismael," *' Psyche Sous 1' empire 

39 



du Mystere," one or two of the *'Eves," "The 
Supreme Kiss," **The Gilt Equestrian Statue 
of Napoleon," and *'The Vulture on the Head 
of a Sphinx." 

After the sculpture, pretty nearly every Ameri- 
can will make straight for James Mac-Niel Whist- 
ler's portrait of his mother and John S. Sargent's 
* ' La Carmencita, ' ' and ten chances to one they 
will be disappointed when they arrive before the 
canvases and not quite know why. 

The reason of this first selection in the Pien- 
ture of the Luxembourg lies in the constant dinning 
into our ears of the great thing it is for an Ameri- 
can artist to get a hanging in the Luxembourg ; 
and of the four thus honored, Whistler, Sargent, 
Walter Grey and William Dannant, one usually 
hears only of the two first. 

Of course the " Carmencita" is in yellow and 
the *' Portrait de la Mere" is in black. *'La 
Mere" presents the figure of a woman sitting in 
a not luxurious chair, a footstool at her feet, her 
hands folded, the black dress relieved by the 
snowy cap and kerchief. On the wall are two of 
Whistler's etchings in black frames^ and in the 
room almost nothing else. 

40 



Fritz Thaulow, the Norwegian, known to Buf- 
falonians by the fine example of his painting 
'* Night, ' ' owned by the Fine Arts Academy, has a 
** Winter Day in Norway " in the gallery devoted 
to the Ecoles Estrangeres, and there, too, are the 
works of Mile. Marie Bashkirtseff, whose *' diary " 
created such a furore among sentimentalists after 
her death in 1884. 

Marie painted better than she wrote, very likely 
because she put more of other people and less of 
herself into her portraits. Those in pastel are 
particularly good, and there is a romantic, fanci- 
ful, ghostlike sympathy ready to accompany an 
imaginative visitor in going from Marie Bashkirt- 
seff s paintings to those of her friend and teacher, 
Bastien-Lepage, in the next room. Lhermitte, 
whose World's Fair picture, '* The Haymakers," 
has so long hung in our Fine Arts Academy, has 
a companion piece in the Luxembourg. Of the 
Meissoniers, the Corots, the Detailles, of Bon- 
heur's, Breton's, Carolus Duran's, Cazin's, Con- 
stant's, Dagnan-Bouveret's, Manet's, Rousseau's 
and all the other notable French artists, one can 
only bring away a confused memory of what two 
eyes have vainly tried to fix permanently on the 

41 



soul ; excepting that there is a general sense of 
style, color, composition and sentiment, which 
clings around each name when we recall it. 

The gardens of the Luxembourg, like its gal- 
leries, are open to the public daily. Barefooted 
children, bareheaded women carrying home bot- 
tles of oil and loaves of bread in knit bags, men 
in tatters, women ditto, may, and do, take short 
cuts or loiter at will through its beautiful walks, 
bordered with roses of every known variety, cooled 
by lakes and fountains most beautiful to the eye, 
and shaded by magnificent trees that have been 
gathered from the choice woods of the world. 

Even a dandy may make love here in open day- 
light, trying his wiles on a demure mademoiselle, 
who is half beguiled by his hand patting and hand 
kissing, and when he finally runs away to more 
fruitful fields of pleasure, stopping every minute 
to throw kisses with the hand free of his cane, and 
lifting his hat in a final farewell as he disappears 
'round a clump of shrubs, mademoiselle betakes 
herself from the garden with the disconsolate air 
of supreme renunciation. 

In the gardens are playgrounds for boys, tennis 
courts, ball grounds and a lake for swimming. 

42 



Women come in the early forenoon with their 
children and their knitting, bringing with them 
their loaves of bread and bottles of wine for the 
midday luncheon, which they freely share with 
the tame pigeons and birds of the garden, the 
birds gathering in little flocks in the grass about 
each friendly group. Here, too, one far from 
home may find a friendly seat on which to rest for 
a little time, breathe in the fragrance of the bloom- 
ing roses, and the spiciness of the bushes from 
Ceylon, listen to the song of bird, and, while think- 
ing fondly of far-away places and people, gather a 
little strength and inspiration for the Pantheon 
which stands just beyond. 

The Pantheon, in the form of a Greek cross, 
with its portico of twenty-two fluted Corinthian 
columns, stands on the site of the tomb of Ste. 
Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, and within, 
on its walls, may be found in painting the story of 
her childhood, by Puvis de Chavannes, who died 
last year, and also the beautiful marbles by Main- 
dron, *'Ste. Genevieve Imploring Attila, the 
Leader of the Huns, to Spare the City of Paris." 

The interior of the Pantheon, with its beautiful 
dome, its magnificent ceiling paintings, its tablets 

43 



to the memory of French heroes and martyrs, its 
painted walls, leaves on the mind a sense of vac- 
uum, something of the effect of an empty vault, 
and a visit to the Crypt, which is by permission, 
save on special and remote days, leaves in the soul 
a new sense of the certainty of death. 

The Musee de Cluny is entered on the Rue du 
Sommerard by a vaulted gate into the Cour 
d'Honneur, at one end of which may be seen an 
interesting old well, which looks as if it might 
tell a tale, if wells were given to gossip. 

Inside, the first requisition is for concentration, 
sufficient to enable the mind to gain a faint im- 
pression of even a few of the thousands of things 
to be seen. Ceramics, that run the gamut of 
French, Dutch, German, Flemish, Moorish and 
Hispano fayence, from the 14th century down; 
precious work in silver, gold, iron and bronze; 
ivories in the finest, most curious carving from the 
tenth century; cabinets, chests, exquisite speci- 
mens of wood carving ; Flemish tapestries, eccle- 
siastical vestments and work in gold, reliquaries, 
crosses, croziers, coronation robes in velvet, 
ermine and gold lace; state carriages, sleighs, 
Sedan chairs, state beds and embroideries ; speci- 

44 



mens of everything ever created by the hand and 
genius of man which add to the ceremonials and 
elegancies of living, may be seen in rare qualities 
in the Musee de Cluny — may be seen until the 
brain refuses further to take impressions, and the 
'* Ferme la porte, ferme, ferme " of the attendant 
with his clanking keys, falls on the ear like sweet 
music, with its blessed release from more sight- 
seeing. 

The closing hour is the very best time to view 
the Thermes or ruins of the baths of Cluny and 
for a look into the garden, where the July sun, 
falling to the west, sets on the grass a shadow of 
the overhanging shrubs and trees, as you take 
your last look and turn your steps homeward 
through the Sorbonne. 



45 




H Tiait ESSSSPSiSIK^E^^^ visits the Louvre should 
to the ■ II ^^M ^^ow something of the treas- 
Louvre* IV %^ \/J/l ^^^^ *° ^^ ^^^^ beforehand and 

should, of all things, keep clear 
of the usual *' guide." One 
would better stare at the pictures 
in unknowing speculation than to be hustled from 
room to room like driven sheep listening to an 
unintelligible harangue on the merits of Paolo 
Veronese's *' Marriage at Cana" and *' Christ in 
the House of Simon," with the '*Mona Lisa" 
hanging unnoticed, and Raphael's ' * Holy Family ' ' 
overlooked. 

Everybody who knows anything ot sculpture 
and painting knows that the Louvre has the mas- 
terpieces of the world, of woman in marble and 
painting — the * * Venus de Milo ' ' and the * ' Mona 
Lisa" of Leonardo da Vinci. They know that 
the * * Apollo Belvedere " is in the Louvre, the 
*' Mercury," the *' Ariadne" — in fact, that sec- 
ond only to Italy is the Louvre in antique 
marbles. 

The '* Victory of Sammothrace " is here, and 
it is on the landing of this beautiful statue, the 
most important existing example of Hellenistic 

46 



art, that many a trysting is kept. Here friend 
meets friend or lover meets lover by appointment 
for a stroll through the galleries of paintings, ly- 
ing just beyond, and it is here one may often, at 
two o'clock in the afternoon, find a little congrega- 
tion of Sarbonne students and their friends await- 
ing the arrival of some struggling young artist 
who, for two francs the hour, will lecture on 
Titian, Raphael, Giorgione, Veronese of the 
Italian school, or Valasquez and Murillo of the 
Spanish, and someone else of some other school. 

Of course, a lecture on Raphael, with Raphael's 
**Holy Family" for a background, is something, 
but there are people who prefer using a little 
of the understanding of the soul and their own 
particular eyes on first coming face to face with 
the works of the * * faultless painter. ' ' 

Then, too. Browning, in his *' Andrea del 
Sarto," has created a wonderful sympathy and 
appreciation for the works of Del Sarto, especially 
those which hang in the Louvre, painted for that 
good King Francis I. — painted — 

" In that humane great monarch's golden look, 
One arm around my shoulder, round my neck, 
I painting proudly with his breath on me." 

47 



Beautiful beyond expression are these canvasses 
of Del Sarto's, with the face of his wicked Lucrezia 
ever for the face of his Madonnas, and a some- 
thing in the yielding grace of all his figures that 
must have had its source in the bending mood 
of his own tender nature, in the subjection of his 
divine genius to the love of a cruel woman. 

Fra Lippo Lippi, too, has things in the Louvre, 
— something possibly that he painted during that 

*' Three weeks shut up within my mew, 
A-painting for the great man, saints and saints, 
And saints again." 

And there's Giotto, 

'* With his saints a praising God." 

And there's the saintly art of Fra Angelice. 

Cimabue, Gaddi, Ghirlandajo, Corregio, Guido 
Rini, Tintoretto, Perugino and all the other great 
painters of the Renaissance are here better repre- 
sented than an)rwhere in the world save in Italy. 

There are magnificent examples of the French, 
Spanish, Dutch and Flemish schools — Corot, 
Greuze, Millet, David, Daubigny, Troyon, Rous- 
seau, Watteau, the Vernets of the French, whose 

48 



works are as familiar in America as at home ; Van 
Dyck of the Flemish school, a whole room given 
up to him; also, of the Dutch, Teniers, Frans Hals, 
Rembrandt, all are beautifully represented in the 
Louvre; Holbein of the German school, Valas- 
quez and Murillo of the Spanish ; and Constable, 
Gainsborough and Lawrence of the English, all 
hang in honored array in this wonderful gallery, 
with its terra-cotta colored walls, its hardwood, 
polished floors done in herringbone, its innumer- 
able turns and labyrinths, room on room of paint- 
ing, sculpture, works in precious metal, wood and 
tapestries. 

The meanest child, woman or man may visit it 
daily except Mondays (the usual cleaning day 
for all galleries, palaces and museums in Paris), 
and it is this wandering at will among the perfec- 
tions of nature and art in Paris that gives to the 
true Parisian that artistic nature which he holds 
supreme above all other men. 

Artists come here, too, to copy, and Titian, 
Raphael and Corregio are, of the Italian school, 
most often copied. Usually you will find an 
easel in front of Murillo' s ''Immaculate Concep- 
tion," the blue one, one of the most beautiful 

49 



paintings in the Louvre. Copies are often pur- 
chased by visitors and are generally made to order, 
the more celebrated the copyist the more valuable 
the reproduction. However, one looking on the 
original and then on the copy (which is usually 
much reduced in size), rarely feels satisfaction. 
There are errors in drawing, nose too long, chin 
too heavy, arm clumsy, misconception of expres- 
sion, a look of divine patience is often rendered 
placid satisfaction, agony of soul turned to vin- 
dictiveness and resentment. Still, good copies 
are made and the color scheme is pretty gener- 
ally accurate. 

One can never have too much of the Louvre, 
never enough, and months and years would still 
leave one unsatisfied in enjoyment of its glories. 
However, a few clear impressions of a few of the 
marbles and paintings may be brought away, and 
if one has a fancy for Leonardo da Vinci's Ma- 
donna, the '*Mona Lisa," and **La Gioconda," 
the wife of Da Vinci's painter friend, Fr. del Gio- 
condo of Florence, why, then, in taking farewell 
of the Louvre, one might take it of her, imprint- 
ing on memory the wonderful coloring, the shapely 
head, the graceful poise and set of the shoulders, 

50 



and settle for themselves the question of that 
**look," which rests upon her face, which some 
call sinister, and one calls only a self-conscious 
defiance of too much looking into his model's 
face by the great Leonardo. 

With the jingling of keys and five P. M. in the 
Louvre, and the * ^ Ferme, ferme, ferme la porte ' ' 
of the attendant, the recovery of sticks and um- 
brellas on the first floor, where they must invaria- 
bly be left, you make your way out for a breath of 
fresh air, going directly to one of the seats in the 
Jardin des Tuileries, entering by the way of the 
Arc du Carrousel (an imitation of the arch of 
Severus at Rome), erected by Napoleon I. to 
commemorate his victories of 1805-06, and on 
the spot where Louis XIV. and his profligate 
court once held an equestrian ball. 

The garden surrounds the palace of the Tuiler- 
ies, and is the favorite resort of promenaders and 
loiterers in general. Its marbles and fountains 
are most beautiful, its flowers, shrubs and trees 
of rare and choice varieties, luxuriant in growth, 
and in the cool of the afternoon or that of early 
morning, one may spend an hour in the garden of 
the Tuileries in perfect restful enjoyment. Be- 

51 



yond it lies beautiful Champs Elys^es with the 
Obelisk midway for a guide post. 

A line of omnibuses runs through the arches of 
the Tuileries and the Louvre, crossing an open 
square just back of the garden and crossing the 
Seine, usually, at getting home time, so laden, 
inside and out, that before one will stop and take 
you up your spirits have sunk to a mental despair, 
occasioned by a knowledge that the dinner is 
being served and you, who like things straight 
from the coals, must take them cold, or what is 
worse, lukewarm, and that without ice or the aid 
of a refrigerator. 



52 




O HAVE two Fourths of July fVailCC'e 
in one year would transport JVatCoiial 
an American boy to Elysium, ^^tc. 
and is no undesirable thing, 
once in a while, for an Amer- 
ican woman, particularly after 
celebrating her own Fourth 
day of July on mid-ocean, 
out of sight and sound of 
boys and firecrackers. 

The French Fourth of July 
isn't the Fourth at all, but 
the Fourteenth, its corre- 
spondence to our National 
holiday being the excuse for 
its corruption or cutting 
short. The day fell this year 
on Saturday, presaged by 
days and days of preparatory 
decoration. 

The United States can set 
the pace, for some things even 
for Paris, but not in the mat- 
ter of illumination — when 
it comes to stringing elec- 

53 



trie lights and shooting firecrackers and sending up 
rockets Americans stand aghast in open-mouthed 
wonder at the extravagance and devices of the 
Frenchman. 

The decorations this year were intended to 
revive and outdo the splendor of the Empire, 
helped along by the modern resources of electric- 
ity and invention. Large grants of municipal 
funds were made, and from what appeared it was 
easy to fancy a foreign loan had been negotiated. 

The decorations of Champs Elysees, the Bois 
de Boulogne, the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de 
la Concorde, the Arc du Carrousel are, of course, 
the most elaborate festoons of electric lights de- 
pending from the arches and winding the pillars 
like millions of colored, glittering jewels. Every- 
where in all the streets, boulevards and even 
alleys, there is the same unbroken chain on chain 
of lights or, where there is a seeming falling off of 
these, the roofs and cornices of buildings burst at 
the touch of a torch into rimmed edges of bril- 
liant, glowing jets. Trees suddenly ripen with 
curious melon-shaped fruit in tints of purple, yel- 
low, red and pink, bursting into lights as the 
shadows of night turn their deep green leaves to 

54 



black. In addition to the colored electrical dis- 
play, flags float everywhere and immense ropes 
and garlands of paper flowers loop and hang on 
arch, facade and turret. 

Band stands occupy every street corner where 
there is space for dancing, away out beyond the 
Bastile and remote quarters of the city, the music 
and dancing beginning on Friday night, with 
students from the Latin Quartier jumping up in 
the air, whirling in a cloud of dust; washerwomen, 
old hags and young ones, coming from nobody 
knows where; old men, young boys and little 
children, spinning about, accosting strangers and 
begging them for a turn at a jig, the whole savor- 
ing of Pandemonium on one of its busiest days. 

A group of students from the Ecole de Medi- 
cine, never to be outdone in street carousal, parade 
the street five abreast, bearing astride the shoulders 
of the leader a grissette in white, and one in black, 
with equal modesty, poised on the shoulders of the 
singing obscene wretch who brings up the rear. 

It is like the sound of lost souls sinking into 
Hades when their rollicking songs dwindle away 
to nothingness as they are finally lost to view in 
the distance back of the Notre Dame. 

55 



Longchamps is all day long the scene of mili- 
tary and athletic sports — the chief being the 
grand military review, and fiacres and cabs run- 
ning to and from the grounds have to be secured 
in advance, so great is the demand. 

At the Auteuil Racing Club there are athletic 
sports and games, in which thirty and more of 
American college men take part, the Princeton 
team, the Chicago University, Pennsylvania and 
Georgetown universities and the New York Ath- 
letic Club being represented. 

In the Exposition grounds the illuminations, 
which make its Friday nights so popular, are at 
full glow. Fountains and lakes and grottoes are 
playing and gleaming in a hundred brilliant lights, 
each moment changing with the ever surprising 
variety of a magnificent kaleidoscope. The Palais 
du Trocadero, with its beautiful lakes and grounds, 
looks not unlike what one might imagine of the 
Palace of Aladdin. 

Underlying the outward excitement there is a 
current of needless apprehension, occasioned by a 
frequent deploring and suggestion by the press of 
a possible hostile demonstration toward President 
Loubet by the Nationalists. 

56 . 



Not only are the sidewalks crowded to the curb 
and out beyond in front of all the cafes, which 
seemingly occupy most of the frontage in Paris, 
but long before the middle of the afternoon 
whole streets are entirely closed to vehicles of 
every description, being occupied by small tables 
and chairs in solid conjunction, from cafes on 
one side to cafes on the other, each table sur- 
rounded by men, women and children of all ages 
and all degrees, drinking wines, absinths, beers 
and sodas, and eating their tough bread with what- 
ever relishes their purse and inclination warrant. 

By nine o'clock all vehicles are barred in all of 
the streets, even private carriages being dismissed, 
and their occupants, with the general throng, view- 
ing the illuminations from the sidewalks or their 
hotel balconies. 

The Place de la Concorde is the grand center 
for fireworks, mostly set pieces of historical sig- 
nificance — one splendid American illumination. 
The bed of the Seine also affords a continuous 
and constantly changing upward glow of rockets 
and pin wheels. 

At the theaters everything is free. At Bern- 
hardt' s, where seating has to be taken at other 

57 



times days ahead, stalls and boxes are filled to 
the last sitting with a rabble that reflects the 
Reign of Terror ancestry, the line for admittance 
having been formed as early as six A. M. awaiting 
the opening at one P. M. At the De La Porte-St. 
Martin, Coquelin is playing '* Cyrano de Ber- 
gerac. ' ' Mme. Rejane at the Vaudeville is giv- 
ing her people * ' Sans-Gene, " and ** Charley's 
Aunt ' ' at the Theater de La Republique and the 
''Ragpicker's Daughter" somewhere else share 
the honors of full houses equally with * * Charlotte 
Corday ' ' at the Frangaise and a dozen other 
tragedies and comedies in a dozen other places. 

On into midnight, past that into morning, un- 
til the dawn, and then, as if a breath from heaven 
had swept the streets, the carousal ends, its vota- 
ries vanish, the music ceases, windows and doors 
close and the French Republic has again cele- 
brated its national anniversary. 



58 




ACKING one's satchel and steam- H Drivc 
er trunk and setting out alone Hbout 
for Europe may have an aspect "parfs* 
of loneliness, not altogether en- 
viable to the average woman, 
but if she has a sense of location 
and reasonable powers of observation there is no 
reason why she should not see Europe by herself 
far better than she can in a touring party. 

The Cooks, of course, represent ease and no 
end of care taking, and whoever takes Cook for a 
long or short trip will find all the conditions of 
the contract fulfilled and something besides. You 
will be treated with the utmost courtesy on trains 
and at hotels, and will be conducted by well-in- 
formed, competent guides, whose desire to satisfy 
and please is only equaled by their ability to do so. 
On the other hand, if I wished to pay twice what 
a thing is worth, to go nowhere and see noth- 
ing, to be treated with every known indignity and 
humiliation, save, perhaps, being cuffed and made 
to stand in the corner, I know of a touring com- 
pany or two that I should hasten to join. 

People using Cook's tickets on the other side 
are not necessarily Cook's tourists, for both on the 

59 



Continent and in Great Britain day parties are 
constantly made up of men and women traveling 
alone or en fammile. In Paris, by taking Cook for 
Versailles, Fontainebleau and about Paris one is 
assured of the very best transportation, a perfect 
guide and table in waiting at the luncheon hour. 

The length of one's stay in Paris should deter- 
mine whether the Cook's drive about Paris is taken. 
If brief, take it by all means, in no other way can 
you see so much between sunrise and sunset. 

The public buildings are thus reached easily, 
and of these one not well up in French thinks at 
first that the city must be well guarded and that 
pretty nearly every public building is devoted to 
the defence of the city, with "Defense d'Affi- 
cher," "Defense d'Afficher," which one sees 
everywhere lettered on their walls. Although not 
so elegant in phraseology, the " Stick no Bills on 
this Wall ' ' of London gets more directly at the 
understanding, when one is circumscribed in the 
tongue and tied down in one language, and that 
the English. 

The start for the Cook's Paris trip is made from 
the Paris office, No. 1 de 1' Opera, at ten o'clock, 
going first to the Madelaine, where at eleven 

60 



o'clock there is always some service going on. A 
stalwart attendant in uniform patrols the rear end 
of the nave to prevent the intrusion of those sight- 
seeing, but you, having the look of a devotee, get 
within the rail, perhaps. 

A font at the left of the main entrance is usu- 
ally surrounded by parents with little children to 
bless and make well by means of the holy water, 
and you pray for its speedy remedial effects one 
sunny July morning when a pale, wilted looking 
child, lying in half unconsciousness in its father's 
arms, the mother looking on, receives the baptism 
from a black-robed priest. Windowless though 
the Madelaine is, its interior is well lighted, and 
there on a Sunday morning one may listen to 
some of the very best music to be heard in Paris. 

The drive includes the Place de la Concorde 
and its Obelisk of Luxor, Palace of the Elysees, 
the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, the 
Palace of the Trocadero, the Ecole Military, the 
Invalides and the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

Nothing can afford a lover of French history a 
greater satisfaction than a visit to the tomb of 
Napoleon I., particularly if possessed of a senti- 
mental and life-long romantic admiration for 

6i 



*' The Man of Destiny." There he lies with his 
emblems of greatness about him, his sarcophagus 
of Siberian porphyry weighing sixty-seven tons ; 
above it, the dome, 160 feet high. Underneath 
is the mosaic pavement with its inlaid laurel 
wreath, and the inscription of his victorious bat- 
tles (and the guide tells you that he won Water- 
loo) , surrounded by the star of yellow malachite, 
the gift of the Czar of Russia. One may look 
down upon it from a circular gallery above or 
enter the crypt back of the high altar, where on 
either side lie the friends *'that liked him so 
much, ' ' the guide tells you, Duroc and Bertrand. 
Above, filtering through golden glass, the after- 
noon sun falls on the inscription *' Je Desire Que 
Mes Cendres reposent sur les Bords de la Seine, 
au Milieu de ce Peuple Frangais, Que j'ai tant 
Aime. ' ' Jerome Bonaparte and Joseph, too, lie 
in the alcoves designed for the Bonapartes — 

** Silent they rest in solemn salvatory, 
Sealed from the moth and the owl and the flittermouse, 
Each with his name on his brow." 

Luncheon, served at a cafe near the Tuileries, 
divides the sight -seeing of the morning and after- 

62 



noon, the Notre Dame being first in the route, 
after the Carrousel and St. Chapelle. 

Victor Hugo has created for Notre Dame an 
atmosphere of horror which a visit very soon 
dissipates, and you finally make your way out of 
it with a sense of disappointment, stopping at the 
entrance to the nave, to buy a tawdry red rosary, 
the best you can get, thinking you will get some- 
one to teach you the *' Hail Mary," some day. 

Pere Lachaise is a good place to visit after 
Notre Dame, although, notwithstanding the am- 
bition of the aristocracy of Paris to be laid here 
when done with their houses in the Champs 
Elysees and the North End, Pere Lachaise has 
some disillusionment for people who love their 
dead to lie where grass and flowers grow and 
where birds sing and where the swaying branches 
of trees keep up a perpetual requiem. 

This is not so at Pere Lachaise, with its tombs 
and sepulchers and houses for the dead set up- 
right in stony, dusty plots, so close together that 
they give a very good impression of the market 
place of one of our thriving mortuary marble 
establishments. One looks in vain for the artistic 
evidences here that mark so finely the Parisian 

63 



taste, and you turn with a sense of repulsion from 
the bead and tinsel wreaths, crosses and gewgaws 
which decorate, only to disfigure, even the graves 
of Abelard and Heloise, Balsac, Alfred de Musset, 
Elise, Rachel, Felix Faure, Rossini and Daubigny. 

A visit to the Morgue is, not to be altogether 
desired, but if made, can be easily paid after 
visiting Pere Lachaise, as it is in its vicinity. Its 
gruesomeness is unmistakable, and though the 
bodies taken from the Seine often lie there for 
weeks and even months without recognition, many 
of them are claimed by friends immediately. 

The Monday after the Paris national fgte, this 
year, found four bodies, all men, reclining on the 
marble slabs, which slant downward toward the 
street, with ice-chilled water running in a con- 
tinuous stream from top to bottom and falling into 
the sewer trough beneath. The clothing was the 
same worn when the bodies were recovered, and 
of the first two denoted gentility and competence. 
The first was a young man in the prime of life, 
whose features of fine intellectual mold made one 
wonder where were his mother, his sister and his 
wife — if he had either. His face was in repose, 
not that of satisfaction, but with a look of having 

64 



at last settled for himself the perplexing question 
of life. 

Beside, stretched stalk and cold, was a man in 
the early fifties, with the appearance of having 
been a ministerial attache, a man who arranged 
affairs for others, the iron-gray beard flowing away 
from his shapely chin in the Dundreary cut and 
fashion. He merely seemed to sleep as if on the 
morrow he would have full charge of affairs in the 
anteroom of his superior. On the morrow, how- 
ever, someone who belonged to him had claimed 
his body, and the place he left vacant at the 
Morgue was empty, awaiting **the next." 

A bruised and battered face told the wretched 
life-story of the third of the group, and at the end 
a dull, rough French peasant slept the sleep of the 
dead. 

After the Morgue comes the Bastile or a drive 
past the immense column which stands on its site, 
and here, in the vicinity of some reform school for 
boys, the temerity of the boys of the street causes 
the good-natured guide to call out, ** You'll be 
hanged before you're thirty," which prophecy 
seems the last drop in the day's sombre experi- 
ences, and, although there's more to be seen in 

65 



this drive about Paris, one of the party asks to be 
set down, and she makes her way home on the 
top of an omnibus, reflecting on the strangeness 
and perils of life. 



66 




[ERSAILLES with Cook means a H Day at 
day of splendid sight seeing Versailles. 
and enjoyment, beginning with 
driving out the Champs Elysees 
in one of their high, luxuri- 
ously cushioned vans, drawn by 
five magnificent iron-gray horses, three leading, and 
all admirably reined by the driver, perched on the 
high seat, red-coated, brass-buttoned, top-booted 
and chapeaued with a marvelous, shiny construc- 
tion that must in time give him a chronic headache. 
The guide, with a smaller party, drives at the 
side, and at various points halts and stands up in 
his carriage to point out the sights. 

First of these, Americans are directed to the new 
residence the Countess of Castellane is building. 

Menier, the great chocolate king, has his 
summer home near Longchamps, farther on, and 
it was here he first hung the * ' Angelus ' ' after 
bringing it back from America, though now it 
hangs in the place of honor in his town house. 
You pass the house where Ferdinand de Lesseps 
lived at the time of his downfall, and look on the 
mansions of many other men of world-wide 
renown. 

67 



The beautiful avenue leading out of the town, 
with its border of park, forest and trees, has a 
moving fringe of mendicants, boys in rags, spin- 
ning themselves over and over on the smooth, 
hard road like tops or whirligigs, coming to their 
feet at unexpected intervals, with tattered hats 
reached out for centimes. Old women with piti- 
ful children work on the sympathies of stran- 
gers, and even men hold out their hands, with 
little puny waifs dragged at their heels or carried 
in their arms for excuse. 

On and out the drive continues, past the Military 
School and barracks, with their white plaster 
walls and courts, where men serve their country at 
a sou per day, into the town and park of St. Cloud, 
on to the beautiful park of Versailles, where, by 
one of its bridle paths, the Prince Imperial, 
killed in South Africa by the Zulus, made his final 
exit from the kingly courts of France. Ivy grows 
close to the path and half over it now, and though 
pressed by the feet of the curious and strangers 
from the ends of the earth, it still has a solemn 
loneliness, bereft as it is of all those other kingly 
feet who used to go its way : Louis XIV., Mme. 
Pompadour, Louis XVI. and his Marie Antoi- 

68 



nette, and Josephine and Bonaparte. The very air 
and trees of Versailles keep up a whispering chron- 
icle of the stories of their tragic lives. You, 
yourself, gather a sprig of the ivy and press it 
between the leaves of your Baedeker for Eugenie's 
sake as you loiter behind the others, reflecting on 
the past, and on what some say, that she was 
somewhat hard upon her boy. 

Grand old trees most beautifully bend and form 
arcades for the walks, rare shrubs are grouped in 
splendid effects on every side, and parterres of 
roses and flowers paint with a hundred hues the 
beautiful spot. 

The granite steps that lead up to the garden 
aflbrd a favorite posing spot for amateur photog- 
raphers, and there is always at hand a *' profes- 
sional," who begs you to sit, free of charge, and 
then on your return at night by the way of Sevres, 
meets you at one of the caf6s with his finished 
product, yourself in it, for two francs the carte. 

You vi^it first the Little Trianon so loved by 
Marie Antoinette, with the English garden and 
Temple of Love, its galleries of painting, its 
tapestries, its jewel cabinets, state chairs and beds, 
its clocks, each keeping the exact hour and minute, 

6.9 



its mirrors, flecked and dimmed by time, reflecting 
your own face as you pass, instead of the beauties 
of King Louis' Court, the gallery on gallery of 
paintings, one and all, fill the vision and crowd the 
imagination to its utmost limit, all to be again 
repeated in going through the Grand Trianon, 
which lies beyond. 

One sentimental, romantic boy in the party, 
who evidently has read his French history well, 
goes about touching with caressing hand the tables 
and cabinets which the guide designates as Marie 
Antoinette's or Josephine's — ' ' Poor Josephine, ' ' 
you hear him say over and over as he goes from 
room to room, and once, when he has fallen 
behind the party for a moment and then comes to 
your side flushed from some new experience, it is 
only the mildest, most sympathetic caution that 
you can give, when he tells you he loitered to 
vault over the rope guard, and lie down for just 
an instant in the state bed of his idol Napoleon, 
with its gold covering and overhanging canopy. 
He's an out-of-town Canisius College boy, and 
one can easily fancy the stories he is telling his 
schoolmates these beautiful autumn days. 

One sees where the Louises and Napoleon and 

70 



Josephine slept, danced, ate and gamed, the 
beautiful room of state arranged for Queen Vic- 
toria on her last visit to a French court, and 
which she finally did not occupy. It is still in 
its virgin state. The court of marbles, bronzes, 
the grand staircases, the Queen's staircase, the 
Dauphin's staircase, are all pointed out ; Gobelin 
tapestries, portraits by Van Loo, Le Brun and 
Mme. Le Brun and other eighteenth century artists ; 
banqueting halls, royal chapels, throne rooms, 
what a story of pomp and grandeur, what a history 
of pleasure and vanity, and the transitoriness of 
life they relate ! Ceilings painted in every possi- 
ble device for flattering kings and perpetuating 
their glory. Seemingly miles and miles of walls 
and chambers of paintings, exploiting kingly valor 
in battle, victorious French battlefields and the 
famous beauties of the celebrated courts of France. 
The royal equipages are shown in the Chamber 
of Voitures; among them the coronation coach, 
the second wedding coach, gilded and enameled, 
of Napoleon I., the sleighs and carriages of 
Louis XIV., Louis XV., Louis XVI., Josephine 
and Marie Antoinette, and the beautiful coach 
constructed for the entrance of the Czar of Russia 

71 



into Paris four years ago, when he made his royal 
entrance by the way of the ' * Beautiful Bridge ' ' 
of Paris, which bears his name. 

The Grand Park of the Trianons is, notwith- 
standing the guide books' criticism of ^* artificial- 
ity," a park unsurpassed in beauty, terrace after 
terrace leading from grassy plain to grassy plain, 
with broad ascending steps of red and gray gran- 
ites, the whole laid out with orange trees, shrubs, 
flowers, bronze and marble statuary, with a forest 
of trees everywhere giving shade and grandeur to 
the scenery. ApoUons, Venuses, war gods and 
water gods, grotesque sea and land creatures for 
spouting waters, these, with hundreds of other 
beauties of art and nature, go to make up a per- 
fect whole, even for the most critical eye. 

It is here the grand waters play on the first 
Sunday of the month from May to October, from 
four to five o'clock, at a cost each time, the guide 
tells you, of ten thousand francs. 

It is also here that one remembers the legend of 
Louis XIV. and his gardener, Le Notre. On the 
first night of the former's stay at the Grand Tri- 
anon, he was asked by the gardener if the land- 
scape pleased him, as he stood scanning it from 

72 



the window. ** I don't see water enough," was 
his reply, and the next morning, on again looking 
forth, he beheld a lake with the most beautiful 
fountains, sending up sheets of water from under- 
ground reservoirs, the whole created in a single 
night by Le Notre with the help of thousands of 
workmen. 

The return to Paris is by a different route than 
the one of the morning, by the way of Sevres and 
its porcelain manufactory, by Billancourt and the 
fortifications of Paris, where the German troops en- 
camped on their entrance into Paris in 1871, out 
by the viaduct De Auteuil, and home. The drive 
is ideal, every foot of the beautiful hard roadways 
being lined with picturesque public buildings, 
villas and maisons, closely set together and open- 
ing out in quaint doorways, dormer and French 
windows, with overhanging gardens of shrubbery, 
vines and flowers. It is near sunset when the 
Place de la Concorde is reached, and the shadows 
of night fall as the threshold of home separates its 
comfort from a day spent in royal palaces. 



73 



H Day at 

fontainc- 

blcau« 




OOK'S tour to Fontainebleau 
is something to be remem- 
bered for a lifetime, if the 
company is as well selected 
and as congenial as was that 
on the second Saturday in 
July. The trip is made by 
the Lyons Railway, the mem- 
bers of the party going to 
the station from Cook's of- 
fice in the Place L' Opera in 
fiacres, the coacher keeping 
his horse at full pace by a 
constant * ' gee-up, ' ' which 
sounds so much like the first 
audible expressions of sea- 
sickness. 

Of course, the ride is by 
*' first-class," and notwith- 
standing all the fine talk 
about the second compart- 
ments being quite as good, 
only possibly differing in the 
color of the upholstery, there 
is every advantage in travel - 

74 



ing first-class abroad. The apartments are more 
comfortable, better appointed, and the attendants 
more painstaking. Besides, the first-class car- 
riages are rarely filled even to the very liberal 
allotment of space to the individual, and there is 
a greater likelihood of meeting agreeable traveling 
companions. 

The July party includes nine men and women, 
an admirable number for a day at Fontainebleau, 
especially for the drive through the forest, as one 
van carries them all, as well as the guide, whose 
proximity and undivided attention are thereby 
gained. 

At the Fontainebleau station, carriages await to 
convey the party to the Palace, where on arrival 
the guide says: **You see the castle? Well! 
You must know something else ; the Stauen, ladies 
and gentlemen, the Stauen, just above the grand 
Escalier, the Escalier du-Fer-a-Cheval, cause why, 
it is shaped like a horseshoe. Well ! ladies and 
gentlemen, that Stauen is three hundred years old. 
Now come with me, follow me always. When 
we go inside I tell you some more." 

And again the guide tells you Louis VII. 
founded Fontainebleau away back in the twelfth 

75 



century, and getting mixed in his Louises he 
bundles them together, saying : ' ' Oh, there was 
a whole lot of them Louises here, Louis XIIL, 
Louis XIV., Louis XV., Louis XVI., Louis XVII., 
Louis XVIII. , him was the last, every one of them 
a king." 

However numerous the rulers of the House of 
Bourbon at Fontainebleau, it was that superb 
monarch, King Francis L, who created and per- 
petuated the magnificence and glory of Fontaine- 
bleau. Whatever his golden gaze rested on seems 
to have increased in splendor, even though time 
and neglect have dimmed that which appeals only 
to the material vision. One looks at his portraits 
on the walls with lovingness, not because of what 
he did for Fontainebleau, but for what he did for 
art, for that divine art of the Renaissance, and 
for his generous wisdom in providing it so liberally 
for his beloved France. 

At Fontainebleau, too, one sees more evidences 
of Henry IV. and his Marie de Medici, and 
much of the present beauty of the palace is due 
to his alterations and patronage. Napoleon I. 
also loved to dwell here, with Josephine, and 
after him, and last in the kingly train. Napoleon 

76 



III. set his weak hands to beautifying and restor- 
ing the place, although no flavor of him or his 
lingers about or haloes Fontainebleau. 

Of the great Napoleon, the guide has much to 
say, showing you with pride a little circular table 
in the study where Napoleon I. signed his abdica- 
tion, and particularly calling attention to a spot 
on its surface, hollowed out by the touch of many 
fingers, on the blot flung out from the pen of the 
impatient monarch in the act of dethroning him- 
self. The guide also shows you the spot where 
Napoleon took his farewell of the Old Guard, by 
the Horseshoe Escalier, leading to the court below, 
and so on to his exile at Elba. 

Again, as at the Trianons, are unending galler- 
ies of paintings, walls on walls of tapestries, the 
most beautiful Gobelins, telling the story of Esther. 
'*I tole you before," said the guide, as we go 
from room to room, **I tole you before it tooked 
a great deal of paintings to fill all them walls; 
now we go the stairs up, and I'll show you some 
more. ' ' 

In the chapel, Chapelle de la Trinite, a ceiling 
painted by one of the Michael Angelo imitators 
is shown, and an altar where, according to the 

77 



guide, the royal ladies ' ' kneeled ' ' at their devo- 
tions, and, being in need of similar practice per- 
haps, you loiter behind to say a word of silent 
thanksgiving, only for a moment, however, for 
the guide is saying, * * Now, you come with me ; 
I tells you everything ; I been twenty-three years 
telling them stories — I know them all. I now 
will show you one splendid relic, ladies and gen- 
tlemen, one splendid relic, but it is no more here ; 
it is at Notre Dame. ' ' 

However, a relic or two more or less at Fon- 
tainebleau, even of Napoleon's imprisoned Pope, 
is no great matter, rather on the whole a thing to 
be welcomed, for it gives more time to sit in the 
little theater, where royalty and its guests used to 
see on its miniature stage the great actors of those 
halcyon days of Fontainebleau. You make your 
way to it through banqueting halls, boudoirs and 
bed chambers, stopping to set your watch by a 
tortoise-shell clock, which used to mark the hour 
of Marie Antoinette's rising, and finish by a little 
ormolu, a room or two beyond, that Josephine 
left behind her when she gave up Fontainebleau 
to Marie Louise of Austria and retired to Mal- 
maison. 

78 



From the palace the guide leads the way to the 
Cour de la Fountaine, where, standing on the 
pavilion overlooking the pond, the members of his 
little party increase the acquaintanceship of the 
morning by idle speculations on the number of 
carp swimming in hundreds near the water's surface 
and in conjecturing the age of the oldest. 

After that, the cool water of the fountain leads 
one of the party to set the fashion of hand wash- 
ing for the luncheon, which is to be served directly, 
and she wins a gallant for the day and a friend for 
life, by deftly assisting a stalwart son from the 
land of the Bruces to keep his cuffs from the 
water as he plunges his hands into the granite 
basin. 

It's the guide again who ends the pastime and 
once more we are in carriages en route to the 
hotel, where, on arrival, the luncheon of half a 
dozen hot courses is laid in the hotel garden. 

Tall trees overhang and shade it and on every 
side are shrubs and beds of flowers, while the table 
itself is something to remember. Snowy napery, 
china that would not shame Sevres, with a gor- 
geous bunch of pink roses for the center, and a 
bottle of red wine standing at every plate. 

79 



A master of ceremonies, with the masterly 
direction of a McAllister, could scarcely have 
summoned by invitation so congenial and blithely 
happy a company as gathered around that table, 
the Knight of the Cuffs, gallantly seating at the 
head, to do the honors, his companion of the royal 
wash basin, whose vis-a-vis, with his charming wife, 
is at home, when at home, at Holland Villa 
Roads, Kensington, London, The gentleman 
from Glasgow has for his opposite his brother, a 
rival in quoting Burns, Scott and Shakespeare, 
the two having left their wives at home and come 
to Paris to the Exposition — Fontainebleau thrown 
in — the first holiday together since bachelor 
days. There is a gentleman from New South 
Wales, Australia, and a Mr. Sturtevant with his 
wife and lovely daughter, Eleanor, from Philadel- 
phia, his American patriotism of that intense 
kind that keeps on the alert for infringement. 

Luncheon is followed by a drive through the 
forests of Fontainebleau, a drive of three delightful 
hours, with plenty of light talk and laughter and 
plenty of Burns and Scott and Shakespeare, and a 
snatch of a song now and then, as the way leads on 
through arcades made of tree branches, avenues 

80 



of larch, oak and elm and chestnut, to the ruins 
of the monastery, on past the red granite quarries 
to the ''Weeping Rock," to the ''Moving 
Rock, ' ' which an old woman, who sells ginger ale 
and other things at her hut near by, mounts and 
begins to dance a little jig, setting the huge 
boulder in a slight motion, and for which she 
receives centimes and sous from everybody, and 
afterwards more centimes and more sous for her 
ginger ale and other things, which she takes from 
a tiny cave in a rock near the door of her hut — a 
cave with a cool spring and running water. 

And afterwards there are more shaded roadways, 
sometimes riding, sometimes walking, through 
fields of heather, where the guide cuts a bunch of 
the purple blossoms, and brings it, as an offering 
of the day, to one of his party who has been par- 
ticularly easy to please in the way of absent relics, 
and who hasn't bothered him overmuch with 
questions. But when a mild suggestion is made 
that the lovely young lady of the party would also 
like a nosegay, he gruffly answers, "It's time to 
be going now, we must return to the carriage ' ' ; 
and so they do, the young Scotch knights having 
in the meantime made up for the guide's lack of 

8i 



taste, by filling mademoiselle's hands full of the 
flowers of their native heath. 

There's more talk, but less of the poets, and 
not quite so much laughter, for the reason that the 
station lies beyond, and there the little party 
breaks up, the little party whose members had 
come thousands of miles to meet that July day in 
France, and having met, and rendered, each his 
or her measure of kindness and good will, shake 
hands in almost tender lovingness as they set their 
faces away from each other, thinking, each one of 
them, that their next meeting day will very likely 
be after the problem of Eternity has been solved, 
and also that — * ' In our passage through life we 
shall meet those who are coming to meet us from 
many strange places and many strange roads, and 
what is set for us to do to them and what is set for 
them to do to us, will all be done. ' ' 



82 




IS easy enough to sigh when f^m 
one is bidding farewell to Paris, pans tO 
indeed, one can do little else J^otldoil* 
than sigh, from the time you 
begin bidding Monsieur and 
Madame good-bye until you take 
your last look of the Beautiful City, with your 
tear-filled eyes, from your railway window. You 
go out of Paris, over which they say even now a 
threatening cloud is hanging, by the Gard du 
Nord at nine thirty A. M., if you are going to 
London by way of Calais and Dover, and are 
in London at exactly five P. M. 

Again the ribboned fields of growing crops, of 
poppy fields in scarlet glow, of stately elms hedg- 
ing the beautiful roadways, of cottages and villas 
and towns so beautifully made and so perfectly 
colored. 

You have for your traveling companions, per- 
haps, a child traveling with her mother in widow's 
weeds, and an elder sister midway in the teens, 
also in black, en route for home after a two years' 
absence in Germany, possibly since the mother's 
widowhood. The older daughter has been study- 
ing abroad. She looks as if she might be a 

83 



younger sister of the beautiful woman she calls 
mother, her great fluff of Titian red hair being only 
a little more lustrous than that which crowns in 
more subdued fashion the shapely head of the 
elder. 

A beautiful child, especially if you remember 
dear ones at home, is a precious favor after Paris, 
where you've scarcely seen one, but have heard 
one miserably cry the night before, just when the 
shadows were deepening quite enough without the 
pang of a child's wail. You're melancholy at 
leaving Paris. 

This one sits over next to the window opposite. 
Her hair is a tangle of golden curls, and her little 
legs show bare from the little white half hose that 
come only slightly above her shoetops. Her 
linen overall or frock is beautifully hand-wrought, 
and she finally grows warm and relieves her hands 
of their tiny open-work white gloves, and mamma 
puts up in the rack the large black Leghorn hat 
that has drooped and flared about her face all 
morning, a face that Greuze would have loved to 
have painted. She divides your gaze with the 
landscape, and by and by mamma opens a curi- 
ously-woven basket and serves a little refreshment 

84 



of seed cake and fruit, which, in spite of a certain 
air she carries of not being quite glad at the 
thought of going home, you all eat in a transient 
sort of happiness. 

Afterward there's a little reading from some 
child's book, you yourself reading and the child 
snuggled up close to your side, her little soft white 
hand caressing your own now and then, and then 
she falls asleep, and presently the salt sea air 
blows in your face and the sea itself is in view. 
** Calais," the guard calls out as he unlocks your 
compartment, and a moment later you are on the 
Calais boat, bound for Dover. 

''It's a good day for crossing." The weather 
bureau announced the fact in the morning news- 
papers, and without the experience of the ''in- 
evitable ' ' sea sickness of the straits you are landed 
in Dover, previous to which the custom officers 
come on board and stick up your baggage with 
little red certified checks of the contents, which 
they have not taken the trouble, much to your joy, 
to inspect. 

At Dover, and from it to London, one realizes 
how thoroughly England is fortified. The Dover 
chalk cliffs, in solid white, rise up from the sea 

85 



like eternal battlements, supplemented by mag- 
nificent artificial fortifications. From Dover you 
make your way up to London through long 
tunnels or deep gorges below the ground level, 
only now and then rising to the surface, enabling 
you to see a few farms dotted over with grazing 
sheep and now and then to catch a glimpse of a 
hamlet. 

Whoever goes to London will find things not 
quite so well arranged on the trains as we have 
them at home. None of Miller's good men 
meet the train outside the city, and, learning 
where you are going, tell you which station you 
should arrive at and arrange for your luggage and 
your own transit. On the contrary you may pos- 
sibly find yourself at the Victoria station when 
you should be at Charing Cross. You yourself, 
with the aid of a porter, must find a cab, and 
then, if you arrive in London, at the height of the 
* ' Christian Endeavor ' ' season, and have not taken 
the precaution to secure lodgings, you may find, 
after you drive across London, up past Bucking- 
ham Palace, through St. James Park to Russell 
Square, that you have still quite a little riding to 
do before you can dismiss your cabman and settle 

86 



yourself for the night. Even the Misses Taylor, 
in Upper Bedford, can't any more than fill their 
beds, and * ' full up, ' * as the London cabmen say, 
is the exact condition of the London hotels dur- 
ing the recent Congress of Christian Endeavorers. 
And even if there are seventeen thousand and more 
hansoms in London — and there are — one can't 
spend the night riding 'round in one, and notwith- 
standing that you can't have ink in your room for 
fear of your spattering up the dresser and stand 
and cloths, and are restrained in some other indul- 
gences, you are still humbly thankful to find your- 
self put up at a temperance hotel, with a Bible on 
your table, which you don't read because you have 
one of your own, and the walls of your room all 
blotched over with choice framed editions of 
temperance and other kinds of mottoes. 

A motto is a great consolation for a lonely, 
unimaginative woman — it gives her something to 
think of, — ** What is Home Without a Mother?" 
or, " He Looketh on the Wine When it is Red." 



87 




H Day at WK^'^iff^^^ GOOD night's sleep is the very 

Kew iU^V BR ^M ^^^^ preparation for beginning 

©avdcilS^ !«^ ^^ ^^ ^^^ things in London, and 

after that, to find your way to 
Westminster Bridge and take the 
" Cardinal Wolsey ' ' for Kew. 
You can look about a little en route to Westminster 
Pier, going on the top of a 'bus to upper St. Mar- 
tins and then on the top of another through 
Trafalgar Square and so on, arriving at ten 
o'clock, and having already concluded that Lon- 
don is a paradise for bill posters and that nothing 
less than plain straight out-and-out ''Stick no 
bills on this wall ' ' would prevent the Lord 
Mayor's house from being plastered all over with 
posters advising the use of " Nestler's Milk" 
instead of a wet nurse's, or *'Koka for the Hair." 
Even the 'buses are so ornamented with these 
placards that it's difficult at first to decide their 
routes, and a general impression is given that the 
princely yachtsman, Sir Thomas, is entertaining 
and all the 'buses are running to " Lipton's Tea," 
or at least are dividing their services with the 
*'Tea" and the ''Circuses," for pretty nearly 
everyone of them is running to some circus or 

88 



^ 



another, Piccadilly circus, Holborn circus, Black- 
friars and Ludgate circuses. One woman who 
likes things to fit, wonders why — with so many 
circuses in town — there are not more parades in 
the street, and looks and listens in vain for the 
elephants and the brass bands. 

The clock in the tower of Parliament strikes 
ten as the * ' Cardinal Wolsey ' ' begins its serpentine 
course to Kew, passing St. Thomas Hospital, a 
string of red brick buildings on the left bank, 
past Lambeth Palace, past the Doulton potteries, 
still on the left, and the Tate Galleries on the 
right. Past Vauxhall bridge, Victoria bridge, 
Albert bridge, the little steamer modestly saluting 
each bridge by tipping its smokestack as it passes 
under; on by the Chelsea Hospital, Battersea 
Park and the famous Cheyne Walk. 

On board the '^Cardinal Wolsey," among the 
pleasure takers, is the Head Mistress of one of the 
' ' Board Schools of London, ' ' from Lambeth 
Road, going to Kew for a holiday, accompanied by 
a child, a child who is, after a fashion, the counter- 
part of your little traveling companion to Dover 
the day before, with the same flaring hat, the same 
exquisitely-wrought linen all-over and the little 

89 



nobby openwork white cotton gloves — you go the 
next day and buy the same kind of glove for every 
child that you love at home — she's like your little 
friend of yesterday, all but the face, that is not so 
Grueze-like. 

Well, someway you attach yourself to another 
child, and the three of you, on arriving at Kew, 
step off the boat, have luncheon outside the gar- 
dens, at one of the little eating houses, and after- 
ward leisurely make your way through the gates 
and through three or four of its buildings, nota- 
bly that devoted to rare woods, and finally, grow- 
ing weary, you drop into a seat under the over- 
hanging branches of a tall elm. The child plays 
at your feet, and close by a London gentleman 
with his wife and daughter, out for a holiday, sits 
enjoying the landscape and presently takes up a 
chance remark you've made about Kew or the 
*■ *■ War, ' ' or about how ' ' America loves England, ' ' 
or something quite as pleasant to hear, and your 
Kew party has grown to a group of six. 

You all go off together to see the Victoria 
Regia, and the Palm house and the Orchid house, 
your gentleman from London having taken his 
lessons in botany when a boy at Kew, and he 

90 



knows every shrub, tree and flower there, and loves 
them with a love born of life-long association. 
Many of them he himself had sent home from 
foreign countries, north and south — and from 
India when he was there in the East Indian ser- 
vice. Both himself and wife have turned them- 
selves into your hosts by the time you reach Miss 
North's Museum of Pictorial Flowers, and after 
that they invite you to have tea, and order it from 
the pavilion served at small tables under the 
spreading oaks. 

The child is not much used to tea drinking, 
particularly hot tea — and she makes herself the 
subject for gentle chiding by pouring hers into 
her saucer and thus drinking it. The chiding 
comes to naught, however, when her host, with 
the grace of a Chesterfield, accustomed as he is 
to dining at the leading clubs of London, and 
with half a dozen degrees appended to his name, 
pours his own tea into his saucer, lifts it to his 
lips and after drinking, says, ' ' My dear, you have 
taught me a nice way for cooling hot tea. ' ' And 
after a little the tea is finished and you all go off 
to view the wonderful Rose Valley, a valley where 
thousands of roses are in luxuriant bloom, flood- 

91 



ing the air with their perfume, trailing from over- 
hanging walls, and brushing your face as you walk 
about in the shaded footpaths. 

By and by you note the lengthening shadows ; 
it's time for the return down the Thames, and 
gathering a harebell for a remembrancer, you all 
make your way back to the boat, and so, on down 
the river, with the sun slanting more and more 
toward the west, and the cool air of evening fan- 
ning your faces. There' s a graphophone on board, 
and somebody down its throat is singing ** What 
is Home Without a Mother," and after a little, 
your host and his lovely wife and daughter disem- 
bark at Kensington. The Head Mistress and the 
child say farewell at Lambeth, and you, yourself, 
walk up the stairs at Westminster Bridge just as 
the tower clock of Parliament is again striking, 
this time the quarter hour of nine ; and then, by 
the two 'buses, through Trafalgar Square and from 
upper St. Martins, you arrive at home and go up 
to your solitary room to sit and read its mottoes, 
and wish the one about *' What is Home Without 
a Mother ' ' was a singing motto, and could sing 
itself as well as the graphophone did, and to 
reflect on your first day in London. 

92 




>WEVER little one might have London 
been tempted by the Paris shops f^ncvV* 
this year, the same cannot be 
said of London ; instead, with 
the war in Africa and half the 
gentry in mourning, Regent 
and Oxford streets have been running over, all 
summer, with all sorts of unused finery, which is ^ 
to be had at one-third of its original cost. 

Even if you are well up in the computation of 
pence, shillings and pounds, you make no sort of 
reckoning between your purse and the things you 
are inclined to buy, and do buy. When the bill 
is figured up and you find yourself a bankrupt, you 
just go and buy more things, and keep on doing 
so as long as you remain in London. Such win- 
dow shows of jewelry, laces, fabrics, mantles and 
dresses, such novelties in gloves, fans and parasols, 
such labyrinths of things for women to wear, and ^ 
to trim their houses with surely can be shown 
nowhere else on earth, excepting always Buffalo. 
Liberty's, Madame Garnier, Louise, her establish- 
ment, strung all along Regent Street for half a 
block, Peter Robinson, what palaces of fashion 
and of beauty their names recall. 

93 



After a day in Regent Street, you find it highly 
agreeable to see how all this magnificent London 
apparelment looks on the English nobility, and 
although it is outside the London season, and the 
nobility is mostly gone away to their summer resi- 
dences — the Queen to Osborne the Friday before 
— a good place for observation is afforded at Lady 
Randolph Churchill's wedding to Mr. George 
Cornwallis West, at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, on 
Saturday morning, July 28th, at eleven o'clock in 
the morning. 

You are fortunate to arrive with a letter in hand 
from Lady Churchill, or a card, else you will 
make one of the dense throng packing the avenue 
from curb to curb the whole width of the church 
and beyond to where the straw bedding in the 
street denotes the vicinity of illness. In the 
throng are ladies arriving by carriages and on foot, 
hundreds of them, handsomely attired and many 
of them subjected to extremely rude and unchris- 
tianlike jostling and pushing by the extremely rude 
and unchristianlike vergers, all the more regret- 
able from the fact that the church is not a quarter 
full, only one thin first row in the gallery, and the 
nave of the church thinly filled at the sides and 

94 



back, whole seats empty, and the intimate friends 
of the bride and groom sitting together down in 
the central seats near the altar. 

The previous Thursday's papers had announced 
the departure of Lord and Lady Cornwallis West, 
parents of the groom, from London to their estate 
in North Wales, which also announced their dis- 
approval of the match to everybody who didn't 
already know of it ; and the absence of the Prince 
and Princess of Wales, who were in London stay- 
ing at Marlborough House, also suggested that 
the Prince disapproved that which lacked the 
sanction of Lady Cornwallis West, who twenty- 
five years ago shared the honors of reigning 
beauty in London with Lily Langtry, and was a 
great favorite with the Prince and Princess. 

However, there are present enough men and 
women of high degree to give the wedding coun- 
tenance, prominent among them being Lady Sarah 
Wilson, nee Churchill, just returned from Africa, 
the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the Duchess 
of Marlborough, in lavender, with a black hat, 
heavily plumed, pushed forward on her pretty 
head, presaging the extreme autumn fashions. 
Mr. Winston Churchill is present, and Lord and 

95 



Lady Londonderry, Lady Londonderry wearing 
black lace over old rose, with any number of jew- 
eled necklaces, with fan and lorgnette chains set 
with precious stones, her jewelry being only the 
counterpart of that worn by nearly every lady 
present, although the hour is morning. This 
abundance of chains also marks the rage for old 
necklaces, chains and bracelets which has set in, 
much to the joy of women with delightful barbaric 
taste in personal adornment. 

The bride enters the church leaning on the arm 
of the Duke of Marlborough, who is bronzed 

* and looks ill from the war in Africa, having just 
that morning reached London, invalided home, 
the groom himself arriving for the same cause only 
a few days previous. The groom enters from the 
chancel, accompanied by his brother officer, Mr. 

*H. C. Elwes of the Scots Guards, joining the 
bride at the altar, the choir singing the beautiful 
hymn beginning : 

Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us, 
O' er tlie world' s tempestuous sea ; 

Guide us, guard us, keep us, feed us, 
For we have no help but Thee. 

Yet possessing every blessing. 
If our God our Father be. 

96 



Lady Churchill is in pale opal blue crepe de 
chine, with skirt gathered at the back and falling 
in demitraine, ending with a deep ruffle of old 
Cluny lace. The bodice is bouillioned in tucked 
tulle, with bolero and elbow sleeves, overlaying a 
pale flesh pink tint of silk, the sleeves finishing with 
undersleeves of blue chiffon. Her hat is toque 
shape, of blue chiffon, rim overlaid with lace, and 
finished with osprey feathers, rosettes of the chif- 
fon, and a cluster of flesh pink roses. She wears 
magnificent diamond and turquoise ornaments in 
brooch and necklace, and carries in her hand a 
nosegay of pink tinted white roses, short stemmed 
and bunched tightly together, and not, as the Lon- 
don papers announced, ^ ' a shower bouquet of or- 
chids and bride roses tied with long satin ribbons. ' ' 
As she reaches the prie dieu, which stands a little 
in front of the flower and palm-decked altar, she 
lays her bouquet down, takes off first one glove and 
then the other, and stands, beaming and happy, 
ready to be made the wife of the man to whom is 
accorded the distinction of being the handsomest 
man in London, and who himself stands beaming 
and happy, ready to become the husband of the 
cleverest woman in London, notwithstanding that 

97 



some of her worshipers feel they overestimated her 
cleverness, now that she has done so foolish a thing, 
as everybody seems to consider her marrying a 
man so many years her junior. There is a very 
genuine ring of certainty, however, in her, ''I, 
Jennie, take thee, George," and in his, ''I, 
George Frederick Milburn, take thee, Jennie," 
when the ceremony is being celebrated by the 
Rev. Edgar Sheppard, Sub-Dean of the Chapels 
Royal, assisted by the Rev. Baden-Powell of St. 
Paul's Church. The ceremony is somewhat 
lengthy, with much kneeling and singing, and 
then the registry has to be signed, the bride and 
groom finally making their exit, the organ pealing 
and the choir singing from the ''Dettingen Te 
Deum" — Handel — and outside is the throng 
waiting for the parting glimpse of the most inter- 
esting man and woman in London as they set out 
upon their honeymoon journey. 



98 




HE thought that the world is Down the 
small is not original, but it 'ChamC9» 
often expresses one's feelings 
on coming at unexpected 
places on unexpected people. 
It would particularly impress * 
you, if on a Sunday morning, 
in London, a gentleman and 
lady from Northumberland, 
England, who spent the pre- 
vious Monday driving about 
Paris in your company, 
should walk into the dining 
room of your London hotel 
and breakfast with you. 

You are glad to see them 
again, and having had a Mon- 
day in Paris with them noth- 
ing in the world could be 
more desirable than to have 
one in London, and no place 
in London is more suitable 
for companionship than the 
Thames. 

You take the 'bus for 

99 



L.ct 's^. 



Charing Cross, arriving for the boat at ten, if you 
wish to go down the river as far as Gravesend. 
It's a sunny morning, and the air is cool from 
overnight rain. The Thames is no stranger to 
any of your party, but your own education of 
the famous river has chiefly come through 
reading Dickens, and you fall by mutual con- 
sent to talking of your mutual favorite novelist 
and your mutual favorite novel, ' ' Our Mutual 
Friend. ' ' 

You yourself are not quite satisfied with the 
aspect of the river. It's a very different thing that 
Dickens has pictured. The river is clear, there's 
very little shipping, the wharves and sides of the 
river look safe and little likely to afford a spot or 
motive for tragedies and evil doing. 

** We are just now coming into the neighbor- 
hood of Rogue Riderhood," says your compan- 
ion, continuing his talk of the ' ' Mutual Friend, ' ' 
* ' and its just about here that he used to tow in his 
corpses at the end of his boat hook, and below is 
Limehouse. ' ' 

Presently you go down to luncheon, your little 
party of three seemingly the only ones who care 
for first serving. You are just tasting your soup 

lOO 



when * ' Man overboard ! " " Man overboard ! ' ' 
and a running of feet toward the stern of the boat 
send the cabin steward, the chef and the bar- 
maid on deck, yourself and companions bringing 
up the rear. 

There, sure enough, is a man overboard, hav- 
ing leaped from the wheel into the water with the 
intent of ending his life. He is, however, now, 
with half-heartedness, attempting to hold himself 
up, and your own boat, with motion reversed, is 
setting back for him, the boat's officers shouting 
to a small boat, that has put out from one of the 
large vessels, to make haste. The deck hands are 
getting out the life preservers and the boat hooks, 
and when you come near him and have again 
reversed the boat, so as not to run over him, 
he has lost consciousness and has to be grappled 
for with the hooks and drawn on deck. The 
most violent methods of resuscitation are resorted 
to, to bring him to consciousness, a state, indeed, 
not yet reached when you leave the boat at 
Rosherville Gardens an hour afterward. He is 
breathing heavily when you take your last look at 
him, and you think, as you take account of his 
face and his powerful chest and bared arms, of how 

lOI 



little use has been his young strength. You some- 
way know he has been cruel to himself and to 
every woman and child who have, in any way, be- 
longed to him. 

At Rosherville Gardens you leave the boat, that 
your friend may revive some of his boyhood im- 
pressions of this famous resort. You tarry only a 
little, however, for you have no taste for *' shying 
at cocoanuts," nor for ^'hitting the bull's eye," 
nor for sending yourself up in a swing, nor 
for having your fortune told, nor for dancing in a 
pavilion, nor for drinking lemon squash. 

You do wonder, however, how so many mothers 
with little children, so many young women and 
old ones, can take Monday for a holiday, — par- 
ticularly when they've made one of Sunday — and 
you also wonder how the lower class English 
woman works her figure into an exact facsimile 
of the leaning tower of Pisa, braced back on her 
heels, with a cavity where her chest should be. 
You think, too, that dentistry can have very little 
encouragement, save in the aristocratic parts of 
London, judging from the repulsive mouths of 
otherwise well-featured women. 

You make your way from the upper side of the 

I02 



Gardens and walk down the beautiful roadway to 
Gravesend, looking over the low stone walls and 
in at the gates of the handsome brick residences, 
each one having its name — ''Holland House," 
*' Westmoreland Villa," and others equally 
interesting — on the gate post, and you feel cer- 
tain that life must have enjoyment, if not gaiety, 
in Gravesend. Beyond lies Hampstead Heath, 
and at the left the Thames. You have tea at one 
of the small eating houses, most delicious thin 
bread, tea that will be remembered as long as you 
recollect Gravesend, cold meat and an appetizing 
lettuce salad. After that you make your way to 
the pier and await the arrival of the '' Mermaid," 
to convey you back to London. 

Life in many phases is represented on the wharf, 
but your sympathies center round a broken willow 
carriage in which two cherubs sleep — cherubs that 
look like Raphael's, save there's no joy or glad- 
ness about them. Their chubby faces are streaked 
with dirt. Their closed eyes are black rimmed 
with soot, as are their cheeks, through which the 
hot flush of the hot day breaks in crimson, and 
their lips are full and red like vermilion. One is 
a baby in arms, the other has endured two years 

103 



of neglect and privation at the hands of the 
mother, who has left them now in the shadow of 
the pier railing, to be eaten by flies and subject to 
danger, while she idles and drinks in one of the 
nearby public houses. You have a branch of rose- 
mary in your hand that you have just paid tuppence 
for at a little flower shop, and with this you brush 
away the buzzing insects as you bend over the 
carriage, a faint apprehension growing in your 
heart that the cherubs have been given some quiet- 
ing nostrum, so heavy are their slumbers. You 
leave them, finally, to join your friends on the 
pier — leave them to the cruel guardianship of 
the still absent mother and to the tender mercy 
of the Father, which you silently implore in their 
behalf. 

The river is not the Thames of the morning, 
but, instead, is filled with every sort of sailing 
craft. Just out from the pier is anchored the 
Champion Barge of the Thames, black hull and 
white rail freshly painted, and with her six proud 
pennons floating on the afternoon breeze. Six 
continuous years has she won the Thames cup, the 
last time on Saturday, just two days before, an- 
nounced by the fresh new streamer nearest the 

104 



deck. The Jubilee Cup, too, is victoriously pro- 
claimed nearer the top. 

When the * * Mermaid ' ' finally arrives and you 
are started on the voyage homeward you recognize 
some acquaintances of the morning. The man 
who directed the resuscitating of the would-be 
suicide is quite the hero of the return trip, and 
you are told that the man himself is lodged in jail 
at Gravesend on a charge of attempting suicide. 
You meet, also, some of the belles of Rosherville 
Gardens. One woman, evidently having ''shied 
at a cocoanut ' ' successfully, is carrying home her 
trophy in her hand. 

The boat progresses slowly, so full is the river 
of boats, men-of-war, training ships, merchant- 
men, steamers, vessels, pleasure boats by the 
score, skiffs, sailboats, everything that can go on 
water. It's a creeping in and out between boats 
and waiting chances to pass the bridges that belate 
you, so that the captain requests his passengers to 
disembark at London Bridge at nine o'clock, 
instead of at Charing Cross, saying it will still 
require two hours to reach the regular landing. 

You make your way by the underground to Char- 
ing Cross and thence home on the top of an omni- 

105 



bus, thinking that you have seen the Thames 
according to the fashion of your expectations and, 
in a way, to confirm your belief in its supremacy 
in the maritime affairs of the world and also in 
the reality of its tragedies. 



io6 




lAVING gone down the Thames on dp the 
Monday, you conclude to go up "ChAHl^S. 
the Thames on Tuesday, and ac- 
cordingly take the ' ' Cardinal 
Wolsey " at Westminster Bridge. 
Previous to starting, however, 
just as you are debating whether to buy a return 
ticket for the boat or trust to the fates to bring 
you back later in the day by 'bus to Richmond and 
thence the underground for home, someone speaks 
your name, two friendly hands whirl you round, 
and you are face to face with Mrs. Randall B. 
Greene of Milford, Mass., who with her husband 
made the trip to Versailles in Paris with you ten 
days before. She with her husband is now going, 
as you are, to Hampton Court on the " Cardinal 
Wolsey ' ' and will afford pleasant companionship 
for ,you all day and a safe convoy home by the 
'bus and underground at night, particularly as 
they are staying in London, just around the cor- 
ner from your own hotel. 

You see the same things on the river, as far as 
Kew, that you saw on that first day in London, 
and after that the immense Thames steamboats* 
dockyards at Battersea, and on past Richmond, 

107 



bordering the river with its beautiful residences, 
its flowering gardens and terraces, its magnificent 
trees, Richmond Hill and the Royal Park. On 
past Buccleuch House on the left side, now the resi- 
dence of Mr. John Whittaker Ellis, who purchased 
the whole of the Duke of Buccleuch' s property, 
and gave up the Terrace gardens for public use. 

In passing Twickenham you see where Alexander 
Pope lies buried, and Sir Godfrey Kneller, the 
celebrated portrait painter, and Kitty Clive, the 
actress, and you wonder if Kitty's ghost is as great 
a romp among the celebrated ghosts as Kitty her- 
self was when she lorded it over the great folk in 
those merry Drury Lane days of hers. 

A beautiful villa, known as Pope's villa, most 
beautifully set with flowers, shrubs and trees, just 
beyond, is the summer residence of Mr. Henry 
Labouchere, who, in addition to his wide fame as 
democratic proprietor of *' Truth" and member 
of Parliament, distinguished himself in this country 
by standing back of Mrs. Langtry's early ventures 
on the stage in America, with his brilliant wife for 
her chaperone her first season out. 

At Teddington, you go through the Lock, and 
are told that Peg Woffington, the actress, lies in 

io8 



the Teddington graveyard, and you think that 
Drury Lane and the Haymarket have their people 
pretty well spread out along the banks of the 
beautiful river. 

At Kingston, you have the history of the Saxon 
kings rehearsed, and are told that a coronation 
stone in the market place commemorates seven 
crownings of Saxons at Kingston, beginning with 
Edward and ending with Ethelred. You pass the 
Kingston Amateur Rowing Club and admire the 
little fleet of boathouses with their roof and bal- 
cony gardens and their windows curtained with 
filmy lace-trimmed muslin, gently moving in the 
afternoon breeze. A moment more and you are 
landing at Hampton Court. 

You know all about Hampton Court, how it 
was built by Cardinal Wolsey for his own personal 
use, and how, when he had it furnished to his 
heart's content and ready to enjoy, his king, 
Henry VIII. , envious of its magnificence, asked 
why so much extravagance had been expended, and 
was answered by Cardinal Wolsey, " To show how 
noble a palace a subject may offer to his sover- 
eign." The armorial bearings of Wolsey are still 
above the entrance to the central court. 

109 



Before entering the palace you have luncheon 
at one of the cafes outside, and rest a little under 
the trees, eating cherries, and saying they are not 
half as luscious and large as the ones you had in 
Paris the week before. You enquire, as you enter 
the court, about the occupants of the palace, and 
are told that they are mostly crown pensioners, 
widows and daughters of noblemen killed in the 
wars, many recent additions being made by the 
African war. There are forty or fifty of these 
ladies of title living at Hampton Court now, one. 
Lady Grey, nearly one hundred years old, not 
being expected to live and having a day and night 
nurse in constant attendance. Each pensioner has 
her separate household and servants maintained 
at her own expense. Very little is seen of them 
by visitors, as they keep closely within doors, with 
drawn curtains, during visiting hours, and only 
walk in the gardens and about the paths in the 
late afternoon or early evening. 

The galleries of Hampton Court are entered 
through the armory devoted to the display of 
trophies and munitions of war. From it, you 
enter the King's Presence Chamber and see the 
canopy which hung over the throne of William 

no 



III. Here you see Kneller's ** Hampton Court 
Beauties" and Sir Peter Lely's ** Windsor Castle 
Beauties." Room after room devoted to royal 
uses are hung with the works of the famous paint- 
ers of all countries. Royal furniture, beds, tap- 
estries, chairs, bronzes and vases ornament some of 
the rooms, and, when the feet grow tired of going 
in and out and up and down, you may make your 
way out by the entrance by which you arrived and 
take your way through flowering beds and shrub- 
bery to the vine house. 

Here you look at the world-famed grape vine, 
with its trunk fully a foot and a half in diameter. 
Only the root is to be seen outside; the vine 
itself interlaces and is trained about the sides and 
ceiling of a glass house, in such a manner that 
the bunches of grapes hang downward, this year 
twelve hundred bunches of these Black Hamburgs, 
and all designed for the Queen's table. 

Outside, hanging on the brick wall of the 
palace, is a Wisteria vine not less wonderful in 
growth, a massive trunk from which rise three 
great branches, which lie like logs of wood against 
the wall, and run oif into thousands of flower and 
leaf-covered branches, covering the whole side of 

III 



the building for a distance of a hundred feet and 
more. 

You find on looking at your watch that it is 
time to think about returning to town, and you 
make your way out by the Lion Gates, take the 
upper seat on the omnibus, and so drive through 
the beautiful Bushy Park Way, lined with im- 
mense elms which extend in back on either side 
over acres and acres of grassy park, filled with 
deer. Through the most picturesque roadways, 
past picturesque, historic old towns, the 'bus takes 
you into Richmond, where you change for the 
underground, and by it reach London, and home, 
not later than ten o'clock. You part company at 
your door with your companions of the day, and 
think, as you turn from them to mount the steps, 
what a God-send they have been to you, and how 
good God is in everything. 



112 




FIRST visit to Westminster on a ^ncstmtnBta* 
Saturday morning gives you not ^x\^ J^S 
too much to do in viewing Nei<Jbbor9« 

statues and tombs, for after a 
little of this kind of pastime 
you can go over to the House of 
Parliament and make a tour of that part of its inte- 
rior open to the public, Saturday, from ten to four 
o'clock, being the only day in the week when 
visitors are admitted. 

At Westminster you arrive, perhaps, to hear the 
last part of an anthem, sitting, possibly, in one of 
the little rush-bottomed chairs, with the statue of 
Disraeli looking obliquely down past you to 
the marble slab in the pavement bearing the name 
of his rival and opponent, William E. Gladstone, 
and you wonder, perhaps, as you look at the Glad- 
stone tablet, if all those ** horrid things in the 
newspapers," about the non- embalmment of Mrs. 
Gladstone, who lies in this temple of fame with 
her distinguished husband, are true. 

You eye the stained glass of the windows criti- 
cally, particularly the one in the transept repre- 
senting the Last Supper. You look with admira- 
tion on the columns of red and white alabaster, 

113 



to the fine wood carving of the choir, and then, 
as the service ends, you walk over the beautiful 
mosaic pavement in front of the altar and begin 
to look about for acquaintances, not, of course, 
among the living but among the dead. Ac- 
quaintances are not so hard to find in the flesh in 
Westminster, for standing just in front of you is 
Mr. Randall, organist of St. Andrew's Church in 
Brooklyn, and with him a young gentleman whose 
exploits at shovelboard you were watching in mid- 
ocean a month previous. 

You see the monument of William Pitt, and 
think of those masterly effusions of rhetoric and 
oratory which the boys used to rehearse in his 
name, at school, on rhetorical exercise day. You 
stop a moment at the effigy which represents Lord 
George Gordon, and recall his fame, and then at 
that of Warren Hastings, thinking of his service to 
England when Governor-General of India. You 
look at their stone visages, and think of them and 
their companions in the northwest transept of 
Westminster as being fit in feature as well as intel- 
lect and valor to represent English greatness. 

You look on the figure of Wilberforce, taking 
things easy in sitting posture, now that slave 

114 



emancipation is accomplished, and view the half- 
reclining figure of Sir Isaac Newton, and think 
how he mixed up your beautiful stars and moon, 
and the glory of the sun, in a bothersome science 
called ^'Astronomy"; you look at the slab com- 
memorative of Darwin, and think of the chimpan- 
zee you saw at the Zoo the day before, and won- 
der if he has at last solved the problem of man's 
origin ; you leave him, still meditating on ances- 
try, and, being a Daughter of the American Revo- 
lution, read with interest the inscription to Major 
John Andre, executed as a spy in 1780. Bri- 
tannia mourns above the sarcophagus, and no more 
tender, dignified inscription could be written to 
honor heroic action than that which immortalizes 
on his coffin his devotion to his country. 

You run through a stanza of one of Isaac Watts' s 
long-metered hymns as you gaze on his commem- 
orative bust, and think the two go well together 
when you see close beside that of John Wesley. 
And so, from one to another of England's great 
men, you pass on to the Poet's Corner. 

Some one has been there before you, for about 
the neck of the beautiful white marble bust of 
Longfellow, ' * Erected by his English admirers, ' ' 

115 



is a half-withered wreath of cut roses fastened on 
the right shoulder with a tiny silk American flag, 
the flag telling you the visitor was a fellow 
countryman. 

William Shakespeare is in this poet's corner in 
living marble, the altar-like pedestal is ornamented 
with the masks of Richard III., Henry V. and 
Elizabeth ; Dickens' s name is incribed on one of 
the marble tablets of the pavement, and near him 
Sheridan lies. Thackeray in marble bust looks 
down from one of the niches; Jennie Lind is 
most beautifully immortalized in medallion, so, 
too, is Oliver Goldsmith ; John Milton has some- 
thing allegorical, something about an apple and 
a serpent, which makes you think of what slaves 
he made of his daughters, and that he had no 
great need to complain of women. Macaulay, 
Southey, Dryden, Ben Jonson, Garrick, they are 
all remembered here in marble. 

At the closed entrance to the royal crypts, you 
give the verger a sixpence and join the little party 
he escorts, with explanations, from chamber to 
chamber, where, close together, lie those who in 
life were pestilence and poison to each other. Near 
the entrance lies Ann of Cleves, fourth wife of 

ii6 



Henry VIII., and, near by, her predecessor, Lady 
Jane Seymour. 

Beyond lies the chapel of Henry VII., the first 
of the Tudors, who, by marriage, ended the War of 
the Roses. In this chapel may be seen, in addi- 
tion to the monuments, some curiously-contrived 
chairs for throwing the occupants forward onto 
the floor if they forgot to sit upright or took the 
least possible bit of a nap during the long serv- 
ice. In this chapel lies Mary, Queen of Scots, 
and near by sleeps Elizabeth, a certain irony of 
fate suggested by the proximity in death of two 
women who in life had found the whole world not 
large enough for them both. At Queen Mary's 
head lies the mother of Lord Darnley, and you 
think as you look upon the tombs that you 
will read up in your English history on going 
home and see if Lady Darnley was a good mother- 
in-law. You admire the wood carving of the 
ceiling and the stained glass, and look on the 
tombs of the Georges, the Henrys and Jameses, 
and go on to other chambers devoted to kings and 
queens, coming out by the way of Mrs. Siddons's 
monument, which is recalled again later in the 
day, when you view those magnificent portraits 

117 



of the great actress in the National Gallery, 
painted by Gainsborough and Lawrence. You 
leave Westminster clear, perhaps, in a few things, 
that is, you can match a few of the monuments 
and persons, which is better than Washington 
Irving was able to do on his first visit, for he came 
away from the Abbey with everything in a mental 
jumble. 

An attendant awaits you on your entrance to 
the House of Parliament to escort you to the House 
of Peers, with its scarlet morocco-covered seats, 
and into the House of Commons, done in oak 
and green leather. You go to the Queen's robing 
room, to the Peers' robing room, to the Victoria 
gallery and the Princes' chamber; you see the 
throne chair and go into Westminster Hall, fam- 
ous for its death sentences, and, finally, when weary 
of all this seeing of men's effigies in stone and 
alabaster, you cross to Trafalgar Square, where 
the National Gallery stands, and stop for a moment 
to watch the children sailing their toy boats in the 
beautiful park, guarded by the four lions, Land- 
seer's studies for which you will presently see in 
the Gallery. You pause, also, for a little refresh- 
ment in one of the numerous Trafalgar Square 

ii8 



cafes, feeling the need of a little setting up before 
the pictures. 

It is in the National Gallery that you will see so 
many of those fine Spanish gentlemen, Philip IV. 
of Spain, painted over and over, Spanish grandees 
of civil and maritime fame, full length and half 
length, painted by Valasquez in his grand serious 
style. Murillo, too, is there holding up the 
eighteenth-century art of Spain. 

The old masters are all there, Michael Angelo, 
in half-finished work, Leonardo da Vinci, with 
**Our Lady of the Rock" and others, Raphael, 
Giovanni Bellini, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Sarto, 
one portrait of himself; there are Titians and 
even away back to Cimabue. 

You may here see Turner, whom Ruskin spent 
his later years in extolling, side by side with Con- 
stable, and you may possibly like the latter the 
better of the two — like him because he has painted 
Nature as Nature appeals to yourself — his Morn- 
ings are full of atmosphere and dew, with first sun 
rays streaming through trees and roadways; his 
Evenings all sun-glow and shadows, and trees and 
branches full of soft-swaying motion, and the com- 
ing home of lowing herds at milking time. 

119 



You look on Turner with the knowledge of his 
perfection, but his magnificent canvases suggest 
an indoor skill of finishing and perfecting which 
appeals more to the senses than the heart. 

You admire Sir Joshua Reynolds's portraits, one 
splendid painting of Samuel Johnson, one of him- 
self, and of * ' The Two Gentlemen, ' ' and his 
' ' Heads of Angels. ' ' You look on the beautiful 
Gainsboroughs ; one of Mrs. Siddons most beauti- 
ful, the great actress in an exquisite costume of 
white gauze silk, striped with pale blue, the stripes 
running round. At the open neck is a blue gauze 
fischu, with an inner folding of soft filmy white ; 
a Gainsborough hat of black velvet flares about 
her clear-cut face, and a wonderfully painted muff 
and tippet lie carelessly in her lap, one hand 
slightly buried in the muff. You can see George 
Romney's ^'Lady Hamilton as Bacchante," 
which looks silly, instead of abandoned ; you may 
see Lawrence's Mrs. Siddons, most beautifully 
painted — and also any other number of his fine 
ladies of the court of George IH. You may see 
Hopner's ladies of title and compare the works 
of all these painters and judge which flatterer 
of court beauty painted most to your own taste. 

1 20 



There are Landseer's magnificent dogs of 
'*High and Low" degree, and his horses, his 
** Shoeing the Grey Mare" being hung by Rosa 
Bonheur's ''Horse Fair"; and there is Charles 
Dickens in his early manhood, painted by his 
friend Maclise. You see Copley and Hogarth, 
and scores of other great English painters are 
exhibited here by their best examples. 

The National Gallery is rich in Rembrandts, 
two portraits of himself, by himself, one painted 
in his golden prime, one after adversity had set 
in. There are Van Dycks and Rubens, plentiful, 
from the Flemish school, and Franz Hals' s Dutch 
Gentlemen and Holbein's German Gentlemen, so 
wonderfully painted, and all of them so beauti- 
fully hung that you turn from them feeling you 
have looked on the best art of the world. 



121 



London 




ROM Russell Square to Hyde 
Park Corner by the Picca- 
dilly 'bus affords an idea of 
the liveliness of one of the 
main avenues of London ; 
'buses going each way, al- 
ways to * ' the left, ' ' at the 
rate of forty to the block, as 
far as the eye can see. These 
are intermingled with han- 
soms, cabs and private carri- 
ages, the London cabmen ex- 
ceeding, if possible, the skill 
of even the Paris coacher by 
driving his hub within a hair's 
breadth, and something be- 
sides, of everybody else's 
hub, and always escaping with 
nothing worse — though that's 
pretty bad — than an ex- 
change of those verbal courte- 
sies peculiar to the frater- 
nity of Whips. 

You may look out for a 
little of the nobility on Pic- 



122 



cadilly. The Duke of Devonshire has his town 
residence up near Knightsbridge, and from the top 
of the 'bus you will get a view of the roofs of 
Buckingham Palace, where the Queen stays when 
in London, of Marlborough House, where the 
Prince and Princess of Wales have been nearly all 
summer, and of St. James* Palace, where the 
Duke and Duchess of York reside when in town, 
and where they were this year until the middle of 
July, when they went with their royal grandmother 
to Osborne on the Isle of Wight. 

Green Park, filled with beautiful shade trees, its 
sheep and vagabonds lying around on the grass, 
the latter smoking, reading or sleeping under the 
shade of the trees, with St. James' beautiful park 
and lake beyond, lies to the left ; on the right, first 
Hyde and then Kensington Park stretch out as 
far as the eye can reach. 

Hyde Park is very well known to you, even 
before you see it, with its Rotten Row, where 
the roadway is kept mellow, by constant work- 
ing and watering, for the feet of the magnificent 
horses that are cantered or trotted over its aristo- 
cratic course, by the gentry of England devoted 
to equestrianism; and with its driving circuit, 

123 



where from four to seven o'clock one may be- 
hold the nobility and aristocracy of London 
driving in equipages that exceed in beauty and 
magnificence anything that can be seen in any 
other drive in the world. Long Acre, with its 
row of carriage establishments, sends its most gor- 
geous turnouts to Hyde Park ; and Hopper, who 
built the Queen's Jubilee coach, constructs for 
Hyde Park riding carriages of as great magnifi- 
cence. 

Daily, when in town, the Princess of Wales 
drives here, accompanied by one or another of 
her daughters, and one may soon come to know 
by the fashions of their coachmen and lackeys, 
more than by any distinguishing feature of their 
own, the dignitaries of the Hyde Park Boulevard. 
Grand old trees, shrubs and flowers unite with 
lake, fountains and statuary to give to Hyde Park 
its world-wide reputation, a reputation which has 
been much helped out by writers of fiction, who 
have made Hyde Park and its horde of idle vaga- 
bonds the plot of many a harrowing tale and 
hairbreadth escape. The vagabonds are all there 
now, and may be seen lying about every day in 
the week and all day long, hundreds of them, 

124 



looking like nothing in the world other than ani- 
mated bundles of rags. 

You go from Hyde Park into Kensington Park 
and up past the beautiful new marble statue of 
Queen Victoria, the work of her daughter Louise, 
to Kensington Palace, and into it, where you 
view the paintings in the galleries, wondering 
why so virtuous a woman as the Queen should 
have hanging on the walls of the house where 
she was born the portrait of such a virtueless 
woman as Mme. Pompadour. You go into the room 
where the Queen was born, and see some of the 
bedroom furniture of that somewhat remote time ; 
and also in the nursery, where her good mother, 
the Duchess of Kent, kept her loving watch over 
England's future Queen at her play, you see the 
dolls, the doll house and the toys just as if the 
child had left them yesterday, and would come back 
to-morrow to renew her pastime. One set of dishes 
in the old-fashioned mulberry pattern is the exact 
duplicate of one which used to belong to a daugh- 
ter of the late Judge Dole of Wyoming County, 
and which is preserved in the family to-day. 

You walk down the staircase which Victoria 
descended when she went to the room of state to 

125 



receive the announcement of her accession to the 
throne when a maid of eighteen, and you look at 
the wonderful paintings on the walls, commemo- 
rating her coronation, her marriage, the baptism 
of the Prince of Wales, when that prince of fashion 
was in swaddling clothes, of his marriage, and 
of many other royal personages and their royal 
doings. You also look out upon the gardens apper- 
taining to the apartments of the Princess Louise, 
where she lives with her husband, the Duke of 
Argyll, formerly the Marquis of Lome, so well 
known in this country from their residence in 
Canada. You leave Kensington by Kensington 
Park, that paradise for nurserymaids and children, 
down past the ** Albert Memorial," and, if you 
are fortunate, you cross the street and enjoy a 
concert in Albert Hall with the Royal Military 
Band playing, before taking your place on the 
** outside " for home. 

You see your last of Hyde Park on a rainy Sun- 
day afternoon. A friend, who is taking the baths 
away off in Marienbad, Austria, has written you 
to accept her horses and carriage for a drive to 
Richmond, on this particular Sunday afternoon. 
She has advised you to start at three o'clock, have 

126 



tea at the Star and Garter and return home in the 
early evening. 

The carriage arrives to the minute, but just be- 
fore it the sky has clouded over and a light rain 
set in. * * It may be only a shower, ' ' the coach- 
man says, as he wraps his immaculate figure in a 
mackintosh and draws a cover over his shining 
hat, and when he suggests that you at least drive 
as far as Hyde Park before abandoning the jour- 
ney, you get in and wheel away with a feeling that 
you'll soon be driving back again, so sure are you 
that the weather has set its face against your Sab- 
bath pleasure taking. 

You drive out by Southampton Row into Hol- 
born, into Long Acre, out into Piccadilly, past 
Regent, Oxford and Bond, past Leicester Square, 
past Hyde Park Corner and into the Park, the rain 
increasing every minute. 

There's nothing to do but return, and you do 
this by the way you came, leaving, as you alight, 
a half-crown in the hand of the coachman, with 
which to make himself a little comfortable after 
his drenching. 

Twenty minutes later, in your room, you see the 
sun break through the open window the rain 

127 



ceases, and you think that of all the elements the 
weather is the most perverse, as you settle down to 
write letters home, thus turning your own disap- 
pointment into joy for those far away, to whom 
your least word is golden. 

Your trials of the day are not altogether over, 
however, for you, who splash about and cover 
everything at home with ink whenever you come 
near an ink bottle, have persuaded the landlord of 
your orderly habits sufficiently to permit you to 
have ink in your room, notwithstanding the rules 
of the house to the contrary. 

You get on splendidly for a time, but growing 
excited in attempting to describe a shawl that you 
found at ^* Liberty's " the day before, you fling a 
great black splotch in the middle of the white 
dimity table cover, and then all at once you 
realize what it is to be in London at a ' ' Temper- 
ance Inn, ' ' where they refuse you even ink on the 
possibility of your doing this very thing. 

According to your English-history reading, it 
doesn't take much to bring one to the block or the 
scaffold or some other dreadful end in London. 

Like Bluebeard's' wife of old, you set out to 
wash off the tell-tale. You are about as good a 

128 



laundress as Mrs. Bluebeard, too, for wash as you 
will, even till your fingers are blistered, the stain 
still remains, and is a menace to your peace, even 
after you have dried it at the gas jet, patted it 
into shape with your hands and given it a dab 
from your powder box. 



129 




Xlhc IPES^JWP^Fl VISIT to Queen Victoria's stables 

Qucctl^B trsi I^^/Q ^^ Buckingham Palace is easily 
Btablcd Is'^^ W^ arranged by writing to the Mas- 
ter of Horse, Royal Mews, Pim- 
lico, requesting permission, and 
inclosing stamped and addressed 
envelope for reply. If you have previously 
chanced around by the Royal Mews, and verbally 
taken your instruction from Capt. Nichols, him- 
self, you may, when you arrive, be shown some 
exceedingly pleasant courtesies. You arrive at 
Buckingham, by the Marble Arch, and down the 
Constitution Hill Roadway, where three times the 
Queen's life has been attempted by would-be 
assassins, past the front entrance and to the 
Queen's Row, south of the Palace, from which 
side you see the wooden framework for the awning 
erected for the drawing-room held by the Queen 
just previous to her going to Osborne this year. 
Stationed at intervals all along the way are the 
Queen's Guards in wonderful uniforms, increas- 
ing in splendor as you enter the Mews, where a 
functionary in red and gold, with white breeches 
and top boots, receives you in the secretary's 
office, and hands you over, for conduct through 

130 



the stables, to a lackey in black, with his tall hat 
resetted and his boots shining like a looking-glass. 

One hundred and twenty horses now occupy the 
stalls of the Queen's stables at Buckingham, the 
eight most interesting of them being the eight 
creams that drew the Queen's Jubilee carriage 
four years ago at the celebration of her sixtieth 
year of reign. 

These horses have never been driven since, 
their lives being devoted to leisure, saving a two 
hours' daily health exercise. The attendant tells 
you that it requires two hours for one man to pre- 
pare one of the creams for the carriage ; two hours 
in which their manes and tails are braided and 
plaited with blue ribbons so thickly that they 
show chiefly blue — a most effective preparation for 
the red morocco Jubilee harness, the entire upper 
part of which is cut out of a single piece of 
leather and so heavily gold mounted that it re- 
quires a strong man to lift it, the headpiece and 
breastplate equally massive and resplendent with 
gold. You afterwards see in the carriage house 
the magnificent coach — enameled in black, with 
the royal crest on the doors — in which the Queen 
rode on the day of her sixtieth Jubilee celebration. 

131 



You see both young and old among the Queen's 
horses at Buckingham, standing in beds of bright 
^ straw, which finish at the edge in a braided matting 
of the same, the whole changed daily at precisely 
twelve o'clock. The Queen's four bays, which 
always go in postillion, are of magnificent stature, 
something near eighteen hands high, the wheel 
horses in their prime, but one of the leaders 
beginning to sink at the back and otherwise to 
show signs of advancing years. Six black horses, 
for state occasions, are always harnessed in black 
morocco with heavy gold plating, and these, with 
horses for semi-state, divide the Queen's stables 
with those for equestrian use and for ordinary 
driving. 

There are young colts undergoing the process 

of breaking for harness or saddle, a dummy 

C jockey drawing for an hour daily on the heavy bits 

of those designed for riding, and an equally har- 

rassing contrivance for those intended for driving. 

Many of the horses are accustomed to women, 
and are favorite saddle horses for titled ladies 
visiting at Buckingham, and these the attendant 
particularly recommends to your favor by bring- 
ing you into their stalls to pat their shapely heads 

132 



and stroke their glossy necks, everyone eying 
you with an intelligent acceptance of your demon- 
stration of friendliness. 

One splendid creature, "Swordsman," the at- 
tendant tells you, * ' is a great favorite with foreign 
princesses," as is also beautiful slender-limbed 
** Fiorina," in the next stall. Both shine like 
satin, and ''Fiorina" half lays her head on your 
shoulder for more caressing as you turn away. 
There's a ''Washington," too, in the Queen's 
stables, but he is rather ungainly and doesn't half 
come up to " Wellington ' ' in beauty points. 

If you have your knowledge of horses and your 
fondness for them lying on the surface, ready for ** 
use in making a tour of the stables, you may, 
possibly, on your arrival at the carriage house, 
sit for a moment on the great gold and enamel -^ 
coronation coach of Queen Victoria. 

"You've come a long way," the sympathetic 
attendant says, ' ' from across the ocean to see the 
Queen's coaches," and here he throws open the 
beautifully-painted door and you, yourself, are 
sitting inside. You leave a piece of silver in the 
hand of your attendant, in token of your visit, 
notwithstanding the Queen's request to the con- 

133 



trary, and come out on the Queen's Row south 
just in time to join in a street parade of a dozen 
barefooted, untidy-looking children. 

A cabman in front of the Buckingham Hotel is 
calling to one of them, **Take that naked baby 
home, ' ' and you immediately single out the child 
addressed, a girl of nine, who is crying at the top 
of her voice and snuggling to her breast a babe of 
six months, sitting upright and staring around, 
naked save for a handkerchief drawn over its tiny 
back. Its clothes make the wet bundle, which 
one of the girls of the company is carrying in her 
hands. 

You set about knowing the occasion of this 
curious street parade and the crying, and learn 
that the children have been playing in St. James 
Park, by St. James Park Lake, and, *^I left her for 
a minute, ' ' says the weeping girl, speaking of the 
babe in her arms, '*and she fell in, and, oh 
dear ! what will my mother do to me ? ' ' 

'* And, yes ! " says a man coming up from be- 
hind, *'and the babe would have been drowned 
had it not been for me. You were fishing and 
carelessly left it to look out for itself so near the 
water's edge that it rolled in." 

134 



You take up the girl's petticoats and wrap them 
around the naked baby, and, bidding her hasten 
home to her mother, press a shilling in her hand, to 
alleviate somewhat the tale she has to tell when she 
arrives. In return, you receive a look and a smile 
that tell you you have given her the very best 
passport to her mother's forgiveness. 

You loiter a little about Buckingham, and wan- 
der off into Pall Mall, and finally walk up past 
Marlborough House, where the gates are just clos- 
ing behind the carriage of the Princess of Wales, 
as she drives in from her afternoon airing in Hyde 
Park. You cross over and have a look at St. 
James Palace, the town house of the Duke and 
Duchess of York, and think how handy it is for 
the Prince and Princess to have their grandchil- 
dren so near, and then, coming out into St. James 
Street, as it is beginning to rain, you signal a hand- 
som, and getting inside are enclosed with a glass 
front, which, to your mind, as you go dashing 
home in a pouring rain, is a far more delightful 
vehicle than the Queen's all-over-gilded corona- 
tion coach. 



135 




H Last Day |PK^U^55 VISIT to St. Paul's Cathedral, 
in I^ondon* li^&v ei /Tj second only in size to St. Peter's 

in Rome, is the bounden duty 
of every visitor to London, and 
after you've sufficiently admired 
the architecture of Sir Christo- 
pher Wren, and tried to catch the secrets of the 
whispering gallery, and made a little excursion into 
the crypt with the verger, and looked at the tomb 
of Nelson, and wondered why he missed lying in 
that Englishman's Walhalla, Westminster Abbey; 
and after you've contemplated the statue of Joseph 
Mallord William Turner, and wondered whether 
the great artist would himself have liked Mac- 
do well's stone cutting, and wondered the same 
thing again about Flaxman's statue of Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, and viewed the heroic sarcophagus of 
Wellington, and gazed on the statues and tablets 
commemorating the heroes of the Crimean war, 
and sat through the eleven o'clock morning ser- 
vice, just facing the splendid statue of Samuel 
Johnson, you will, not being one of the immor- 
tals, but altogether mortal, begin to think of an 
appointment you have with a friend for luncheon, 
reminded thereof by the statue of the great lexico- 

136 



grapher. Perhaps the luncheon has been arranged 
by a friend on the continent, and you are happy 
enough to have for your host Mr. Andrew Jackson 
Stone of London, whose wife is one of the charm- 
ing daughters of Mr. Daniel O'Day, and spent 
her childhood in Buffalo in the palatial O'Day 
home in Delaware Avenue. 

The luncheon itself is to be eaten at "Ye Olde 
Cheshire Cheese Chop Shop" — and when you 
have made your way through St. Paul's Church- 
yard, looking in the shop windows as you go, — 
for they are shops and Bon Marches which you 
view in St. Paul's Churchyard, instead of graves, — 
you arrive, by the way of Fleet Street, at 16 Wine 
Office Court just as the clock strikes the half hour 
after midday. 

The reason that half after twelve is the exact 
time to cross this historic threshold is because at 
that precise minute the special dish of the day 
comes steaming from the oven — on Saturdays a 
beefsteak pudding, and on Thursdays a delicious 
beefsteak stew — and is served to your order by a 
waiter, to a certainty, the counterpart of him who 
served the great Samuel Johnson more than a 
hundred years ago, and, indeed, may date back as 

137 



far as the rebuilding of the Old Cheshire, in 1667, 
so perfectly in keeping are his looks and manners 
with the traditions of the place. 

You cross the floor, carpeted with sawdust, and 
here your host says, as you sit down, '^ In the seat 
of honor ' ' ; and on turning around you see nailed 
up behind you on the wall a great brass plate, 
with the name of ** Samuel Johnson" at the top 
and underneath an inscription setting forth his 
claims to distinction. You wonder to this day if 
your host gently directed you to that seat, or if you 
went direct to it yourself by natural selection. 

You eat your luncheon and drink something — 
it may possibly be hock, and as you munch your 
old bread — they always serve ' ' old bread ' ' at the 
Old Cheshire — you look about you reflectively, 
wondering whether Boswell sat on the right or 
the left of the table, and if Oliver Goldsmith 
liked the cooking ; and you also remember a 
manuscript letter of Dr. Johnson's yoii read the 
day before in the British Museum, wherein Mr. 
Johnson excuses himself from dining with Mr. 
Wilkes and Miss Wilkes on the following Tuesday, 
on the plea of being already promised to dine 
with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and also on the foUow- 

138 



ing Wednesday, for the reason that himself and 
Mr. James Boswell are to dine with Mr. Parsash ; 
and you wonder if it might not have been possible 
that Mr. Johnson was not very fond of Mr. Wilkes 
and Miss Wilkes, and that it was at the Cheshire 
that both of those high-sounding dinner engage- 
ments were kept. 

The London Tower is in the vicinity of Black- 
friars, and from Fleet Street, by 'bus, is only a 
minute's time, and you arrive by the Lion's Gate, 
and after purchasing a ticket to the Crown Jewels 
and the armory, you make your way into and up 
the stairs of that palace of horrors where the 
Princes were smothered and pretty nearly every 
misery in the history of torture and degradation 
has been endured. 

You look out the Tower windows on the Thames, 
as you mount the stone stairs to the cells of the 
prisoners of state, and go through the most won- 
derful museum for armor in the world, and you 
look at the Crown Jewels, and wonder if royalty 
eats more salt than other people, indicated by so 
many massive gold saltcellars. You look at the 
gold salver from which the Queen dispenses alms, 
and think what a magnificent sum she should give 

139 



away to comport with such a magnificent platter ; 
you look at the original setting of the Kohinoor 
and are not pleased with the great glass -like imi- 
tations which make the trio in the exquisitely 
wrought circlet, then turn away to descend to the 
open square, and stand meditating on the end of 
greatness at the little chained-in-spot of earth 
where Anne Boleyn, Katharine Howard and Lady 
Jane Grey were beheaded. 

After that you look at the Tower ravens, and 
the attendant tells you that two of them are 
* ' more clever than the others, ' ' and you ask him 
their manner of exhibiting their cleverness, and 
he says, ** Oh, they are not so distant ; a bit more 
friendly"; and you pass out of the Tower gate 
thinking that is the exact way with men and 
women, the clever ones exhibit their cleverness 
most by being * * a bit more friendly, not quite so 
distant. * ' 

The British Museum in Russell Square may be 
visited en route for home, and here, whatever else 
you forget to inspect, remember the Elgin Marbles. 
Remember, also, to look at the statue of Shakes- 
peare, in the entrance hall, a gift to the Museum 
by Garrick. One can spend a lifetime in the 

140 



British Museum and then leave things unseen, but 
a casual visitor may glance at the statuary, the 
King's Library presented by George IV., and the 
earliest specimens of book making — with all their 
gold tooling and blind tooling and stippling and 
low reliefs and jewelings, and you may see the Royal 
Seals and then, possibly, the manuscripts will afford 
the most interest ere you take your final leave. 

You may have heard that the last letter Dickens 
ever wrote is treasured here, and you search it out, 
and find it was written to his friend Charles Kent, 
on the day before Dickens died — and reads : 

** To-morrow is a very bad day for me to make 
calls. I hope to be ready for you at three o'clock. 
If I can't be why then I shan't be." 

Byron, too, has a characteristic letter, which 
shows his dependence on God, written in Athens, 
November 11, 1816 : 

* ' It is in the power of God, the Devil and Man 

to make me poor and miserable, but neither the 

second nor the third shall make me sell Newstead, 

and by the aid of the First I shall persevere in 

this resolution. ,,^ ^ ,, 

** George Gordon. 

141 



Thackeray, too, has a letter of his own color in 
the museum, written to a Mr. T. W. Gibbs on 
some passages in Sterne's letters and his Bramine's 
Journal. The letter is in this wise ; 

* ' However on that day Sterne was writing to 

Lady P and going to Miss -'s benefit 

— He is dying in his journal to the Bramine. 
* Can't eat, has the doctor and is in a dreadful 
way.' He wasn't dying but lying I'm afraid. 
God help him, a falser man it is difficult to think 
of. Of course any man is welcome to think of 
me as he likes, — except a parson. I cannot help 
looking upon Swift and Sterne as a couple of 
traitors and renegades with a scornful pity for 
them in spite of their genius and greatness. 

** William Makepeace Thackeray. 
*' September 12, 1851." 

You leave the Museum thinking Thackeray as 
masterful and handy at cutting and slashing among 
his enemies as in his books. As you have still 
one parting visit to pay before leaving London, 
— to **The Foundlings Hospital," — quite near 
your hotel, you make your inquiry at the gate, and 

142 



though the hour has expired for receiving visitors 
you are admitted, and under the guidance of Charles 
Moxom, one of the foundlings, you go through 
this home for fatherless children. Your guide 
has mastered the rudiments of his grammar well 
and speaks his English with the * ' ow " and 
* * oi " for o and a — and begs your pardon on 
occasion, with a running of the two words together 
and no harsh diphthongal sound, quite equal to 
the best London pronunciation. He takes you to 
the picture gallery, and when you ask him on what 
days the children come here he answers * ' never, ' ' 
and then he shows you the committeemen's par- 
lor, and the boys' dining room and the boys' 
dormitory, with the boys' work trousers lying 
handy for morning use. He takes you through 
the boys' classrooms, telling you by the way that 
the boys are intended for the army unless physic- 
ally disabled, in which case, at fifteen, they are ap- 
prenticed to tailors, and that the girls are in- 
structed for domestic service. You go through 
the girls' room, noticing the Stars and Stripes on 
the wall wound with the Union Jack. You see 
them at their studies and go into the sewing 
room, where they are working at plain sewing and 

X43 



mending, all dressed alike in a thick brown wool- 
en stuff with a band of maroon at the neck and 
elbow sleeve. 

Their origin and history are not interesting. 
Low, ignorant parentage on the mother's side, 
unknown on the father's. Babyhood spent down 
in Kent and Surrey, where the nurseries are, and 
rigid discipline and no tenderness for all their 
childhood days. 

One child is bitterly crying as you go through 
the primary grade, and his teacher, not at first 
aware of your presence, is roughly scolding, each 
moment increasing his terror and tears. The 
child has not yet left off frocks, and his blue eyes 
look up to yours only scarcely less dimmed with 
tears than his own, and he pauses in his crying as 
you gently protest to the teacher's assertion that 
''he's a bad boy, always crying, and that crying 
is good for children. ' ' 

It's a good way to recruit the Queen's army, 
you reflect, as you come away, and you shake the 
limp hand of pale, puny Charles Moxson, that he 
may hasten back to his band practice, and walk 
down the graveled path to the gate, half sorry 
that you spent your last afternoon in London 

144 



in a Foundling's Asylum, notwithstanding its 
new swimming bath, its chapel for worship, its 
picture gallery and the special patronage of the 
Queen. 



145 



'Co Hntwcrp 
by the 
Rarwicb 
Boat« 




jOU can't stay forever in London 
any more than you could in 
Paris, and therefore the hour for 
packing arrives, and somewhere 
near sundown you take a han- 
som for the Liverpool Street 
station in time for the Harwich train at eight 
o'clock on the Great Eastern Railway. You are 
not, you feel sure, looking your last on London ; 
you are coming back sometime to begin where 
you are leaving off, and to continue the delightful 
acquaintanceship that has so blessed your stay in 
London. 

It is rather lonely, going out of London after 
the shades of night are falling, but you must go at 
night, if you catch the Harwich boat for Antwerp, 
which sails at nine forty-five in the evening. 

The Harwich boat is restricted in its accommo- 
dations, you find, when you do reach it and make 
your way, with a struggling throng, to the saloon. 
If you have taken the precaution to telegraph for 
a berth, well and good, there's your berth waiting 
for you ; but if, on the contrary, you've trusted to 
luck, you will need to make some special requisi- 
tion on your purse for the benefit of the stewardess, 

146 



or make your bed on one of the cushioned seats of 
the saloon, or, worse still, cross the Channel 
huddled into any corner or chair you find vacant. 

In the stateroom there is not the leisurely going 
to bed of a longer voyage. You know you are to 
arrive in Anvers at nine o'clock the next morning, 
and, wishing to see something more of the Scheldt 
than you did on your first arrival, and hearing 
everyone talking about the ' ' choppiness ' ' of the 
Channel, you conclude your better way lies in 
making yourself quiet in your berth as speedily as 
possible. 

There are, however, in your stateroom, those 
who are making great preparations for sea sickness, 
and inviting it with every breath, two sisters, en 
route to the Aix for the baths, lugging a whole 
bundle of musty old complaints with them, chief 
of which is their rheumatism. *' They always are 
sick in crossing, and they are going to be this 
time," and immediately proceed to make them- 
selves so by ordering from the stewardess strong 
concoctions of something to dfink that fills the 
cabin with a smell of rum. 

You run up the Scheldt in the light of the early 
morning with the sun rising from behind the low 

147 



level of the country and sending its glint over the 
picturesque scenery, the highest point being the 
Cathedral tower in the distance. 

Again you see the windmills, the red-roofed 
cottages, the exquisite emerald of grass and tree, 
and the cattle coming down to the water's edge — 
a living panorama that can be seen over and over 
again with increasing delight. 

You have a brief interview with the customs 
officers just previous to arriving at the Antwerp 
dock for the Harwich boat, two miles up from 
that of the Red Star Line, and you are scarcely at 
the landing before you are in the Queen's Hotel 
'bus en route for one of the most comfortable 
hotels in the first city in Belgium. 

You are prepared to admire all the quaintness 
of this old Flemish town, to see nothing but pic- 
turesqueness in its curiously-constructed buildings, 
the laying out of its streets, and its peasantry, but 
you actually see nothing pictorial, nor comfort- 
able, nor necessary, in the clattering around the 
cobblestone street, of men, women and children in 
wooden shoes. You see nothing to delight the 
eye in a bleached-hair kitchen maid running out 
into the middle of the highway to wring her 

148 



greasy dishcloth, wring it, look up and down, 
have a word with a passing drayman, and then run 
back to her untidy kitchen again. Nor does it 
quite meet your taste to be obliged to step off the 
narrow sidewalk into the street in making your 
way through the principal thoroughfares because 
some housewife is occupying the whole space, sit- 
ting outside her door paring her potatoes for the 
midday family meal. It's the fashion to call 
these things picturesque, when seen far from home, 
but if you, yourself, don't care to, why then you 
needn't. 

There are things, however, to see in Antwerp 
worth your while, and you have known long 
before reaching it that if you see nothing else you 
must see Rubens' masterpiece, * * The Descent 
From the Cross," which hangs in the Cathedral. 
You should see this as many times as possible. On 
Sunday you may see it without cost, but on week 
days you pay a franc for its unveiling. You have 
been looking on the Christ faces of Raphael, 
Correggio and Da Vinci, and possibly Rubens' 
faces may not seem quite gentle and patient 
» enough, not enough like the faces of Him who 
was the embodiment of love, to quite meet your 

149 



expectations, but you know that this is one of the 
great paintings of the world, and your opinion of 
one quality or another has no weight even with 
yourself. There is a small woman copying it as 
you stand in front of it, and one or two artists are 
painting in other parts of the Cathedral, for the 
Notre Dame of Antwerp has many splendid paint- 
ings besides its great one, notably * * The Elevation 
on the Cross, " * * The Assumption, ' ' and * ' The 
Resurrection." It has, too, its magnificent wood 
carvings and its chime of bells, which, having 
once heard, you will never forget. You visit the 
King's Palace, the parks, the Zoo, the Musee of 
Peinture, the lace manufactories, and the Prison of 
the Inquisition, and here, after going through its 
old printing quarters, through its musee, its armory 
and chamber of implements of torture, you take 
your brass candlestick, with a handle like a frying 
pan, its tallow dip faintly glowing, and make your 
way to the dungeon below. 

You have for a companion a woman, who makes 
herself the central feature of all her own sight- 
seeing. *' Going to have a torch-light proces- 
sion ? ' ' she glibly says as you go down the dark 
stone staircase, slippery with thousands of tallow 

150 



drippings from the candles of other sight-seers be- 
fore you. '' I wonder if the ghosts of the prison- 
ers can see us now, and what they think of us ? " 
she continues, peering around into corners and 
stone cells, where the walls are reeking with a slow 
oozing slime, and where you see the chains and 
rings that held those prisoners of state to their 
loathsome prison, and the hooks in the stone ceil- 
ing, where they were strung up for torture. * ' God 
forbid, ' ' you answer her, shuddering, ' * that the 
souls of those poor unfortunates should haunt such 
a spot as this, and, if they did, it is scarcely a 
curious woman, with a tallow candle in one 
hand and her petticoats in the other, that they'd 
trouble about." It rains when you make your 
exit from the prison, and you breathe a sigh of 
relief, for now you are going back to your hotel, 
your sight-seeing all done, and to-morrow you go 
on board the * * Noordland, ' ' bound for home — 
home in America, a country for which you have 
new love and reverence, born of your journeyings 
abroad. 

The Queen's, lying, as it does, on the quay, and 
encircled by street railways — the old-fashioned 
horse cars — has a large patronage, and in its 

151 



rather imposing and very artistic parlor many 
confidences are exchanged between those just step- 
ping on land from long voyages and those waiting 
to embark for home, with their traveling in for- 
eign lands all behind them. 

One woman breaks down and cries at the first 
sympathetic word you give her. She has arrived 
the night before from a whole month on the ocean, 
sailing from Baltimore on some kind of a trading 
vessel. She's been the only woman on board, 
and, although esteeming herself a good sailor, she 
has been upset most of her voyage by the pitching 
of the boat, her berth performing the ups and 
downs of a teterboard, most of the time being 
straight up and down and she herself having to 
cling to the sides with both hands. 

This, however, was not altogether the occasion 
of her tears. The present has its difficulties, she 
tells you. She has come over with half a dozen 
parcels, the largest of which weighs two hundred 
and twenty-five pounds avoirdupois. She's just 
been told about the restrictions as to baggage on 
trains, only fifty-six pounds allowed free, and in 
Germany, where she expects to travel extensively, 
things are worse than even that. 

152 



She's over to remain until away into December, 
and a suggestion from yourself that she store some 
of her luggage in Antwerp meets with refusal — 
she must have clothes, she's going to Lucerne, and 
Aix-les-Bains, and no end of other fine places, and 
evidently she's over to be seen quite as much as 
to see, and, therefore, must pay the price. 

She has some other foolish notions that will 
cause her more tears before she gets back home ; 
she has, although she's been but one day in 
Antwerp, been around to Mme. Berbegette's and 
purchased a nice lace bertha of duchess and rose- 
point for herself, and another for her mother, and 
she's been to the silversmiths, and begun a collec- 
tion of silver spoons, with one bearing on its 
handle the head of King Leopold, and she's going 
up to Rotterdam and to the Hague for a day or 
two, and expects to find another spoon with Queen 
Wilhelmina on its handle, and this interesting 
spoon fad she .intends to keep up through all the 
rest of her stay abroad. 

It's your last day, your last night in Antwerp. 
You are not sorry. You've not greatly cared for 
this old town much lauded for quaintness and for 
Rubens' house, and other things. Five days have 

153 



been ample for seeing it, and even now you find 
time dragging a little at the end. 

You came principally because it was your sail- 
ing point — and to see the Cathedral. You've 
seen the Cathedral and, what's more, heard it — 
heard it almost continuously, or, that which 
amounts to the same thing, you've heard the 
Cathedral chimes day and night. At first you 
doubted your ears, thinking it could not be 
snatches from ' 'Pinafore, ' ' and the light operas you 
heard the church bells pealing out, and were only 
satisfied that you heard aright, when told that the 
city, and not the church, owns the bells in 
the Cathedral tower, and that the repertoire of 
the bells is anything but sacred. 

VoMY bedroom window opens almost on the 
Cathedral, only three blocks away, and there's a 
clear way from its belfry over the red-tiled gable 
roofs to your ear. Most of your Anvers nights 
have been rendered wakeful by the tuneful notes 
of its chimes, and on this last night they give you 
no rest at all. Your conscience may be uneasy 
from too much loitering in the old silver shops or 
from overmuch buying at the lace manufactories ; 
whatever it is that's gone wrong, be sure the bells 

154 



will play the accompaniment to every perturbed 
heart throb. 

You pat your hard pillow and turn it upside 
down, hoping to find a soft spot for your weary 
head, trying to drown the Cathedral jingle of 
* * Old Grimes ' ' by groaning aloud in language 
tragic enough for Shakespeare, * * Kind heaven, 
what is the legend about Dutch feather beds ? ' ' 
And then remembering that Belgium isn't Hol- 
land, you give'your pillow another thump and de- 
mand of High Heaven the reason why Flemish 
geese shed rocks instead, of feathers ? Just then, 
perhaps, you get a little nap and dream you are 
struggling with hammer and nails to crate the 
great ' ' Cathedral Rubens, ' ' and awaken a moment 
afterward, always to the tune of the bells, crying 
out, **How in the world am I to crowd this life- 
size statue of Napoleon into my steamer trunk ? ' ' 



155 




Cbe Ly^^^JV'JjVERYTHING comes to an end, 
Toyag^ If mi^^k an however, and you are through 
Rome. 1 _ f |1 with foreign lands and are set 

down on the ' ' Noordland, ' ' 
bound for home. It is after seven 
o'clock at night, and it's rain- 
ing ; the boat is to sail at seven next morning, and 
at four A. M. the steerage passengers — nine 
hundred of them — come on board the boat in a 
pouring rain. They undergo a hurried, physical 
examination, their mouths are pulled open, eye- 
lids lifted, arms and legs given a jerk, to see if 
they are all there, and then are shoved onto the 
gang plank that severs them from home. 

You, yourself, have, on your arrival, been a 
little upset. You were promised a cabin all to 
yourself by the ship's company no longer ago than 
the day before, and exclaim against the untrust- 
worthiness of men when, on reaching your state 
room, you find it all cluttered up with not only 
your own but some one else's baggage. 

You recall, with the cold sweat on your brow, 
that cabin of four going over, when every woman 
of the lot had a silver-backed comb and no one 
could ever quite tell which was her own. You 

156 



faintly hope, beginning at once with your usual 
philosophy to make the best of things, that there'll 
be no silver-backed nonsense about this new fellow 
voyager, and that she'll not make your soap dish 
a repository for hair combings, and that she'll re- 
spect your wishes about individual towels, and 
that she's not tall and long legged like a stork, as 
some other ocean traveler you remember, and if 
she is, that she won't comb her hair attired in a 
modesty skirt that stops above her knees. 

Your baggage is all accounted for, you've seen 
to that yourself, and it is safely piled up on the 
sofa of your state room, and, having nothing else to 
do, you go to bed, thinking the little welcome you 
have to give to the owner of the medley of all- 
overs, rugs and satchels piled up on your cabin 
floor, can just as well be given lying down as 
standing up, particularly if she finds you asleep. 

You don't go to sleep, however. There's too 
much racing through the halls, and calling on 
stewards and stewardesses to be shown to state- 
rooms, and badgering them about lost baggage, to 
allow you to sleep. Finally, your own number is 
being sought, a knock at the door — it is gently 
pushed open by the steward, his own being one of 

157 



the three faces peering in. You think your time 
has come, and anathematize the steamship com- 
pany as you think of the twelve long days and 
nights ahead, when, from the steward, ^'Is this 
your's, madame? this and this? " someone in the 
passage answering ^ * yes ' ' meanwhile, until the 
last thing, even to the silver-topped, pearl-han- 
dled umbrella is lifted out, and you are left with 
your own five pieces, and yourself in your own 
cabin for the whole of the blessed voyage home. 

It is beyond you to realize at first that all your 
woes have disappeared in this good-story-book 
kind of a fashion, but when you do you spring 
out of bed to draw the bolt on your door, dancing 
meanwhile a gleeful little bit of a jig and fall to 
sleep thereafter, thinking if any corporation in the 
world keeps its agreements to the exact letter, that 
corporation is the Red Star Line Ship Company. 

In the morning, although at the sailing hour, 
there's a great taking on and throwing off of 
bridges, ropes and dock appendages, and plenty 
of whistling and putting-to-sea bustle, the boat 
makes very little headway and loiters in the 
Scheldt the whole day through, it being impos- 
sible, with the low water, to get over the ' * bar. ' ' 

158 



There's a heavy wind blowing, which rocks the 
boat and keeps the deck dren.ched with the wash 
of the waves mingling with the rain, which has not 
ceased for twenty-four hours. You take out your 
heavy ulster, which has been lying wrapped in 
your steamer rug in Antwerp all summer, and, but- 
toned snugly within it, you brave the wind and 
water of the deck a good part of each day while 
the storm continues, as it is far preferable to the 
saloon, where the motion of the ship is most un- 
pleasantly felt, or the ladies' parlor above, where 
half a dozen women begin at once to lounge in a 
frowsy state of semi-invalidism, which renders its 
air poison to you, who think sickness something 
to be kept under lock and key and not to be 
paraded in public places. 

You take little thought of the location of your 
steamer chair and as little concern in your table 
sitting, save that you keep a bit away from the 
"tourists"; you haven't any ideas that match 
theirs, and feel a little tongue-tied on most of their 
subjects. 

There are plenty of them on board, getting 
home from foreign conventions and from touring 
the Continent, spending two days in Paris, two 

159 



days in Brussels, going down the Rhine and up to 
Rome and everywhere. They've made splendid 
use of their opportunities and hold ** quizes" 
each day at three o'clock in the saloon to keep 
from forgetting anything and to enrich their minds 
by the interchange of experiences in ruins, castles 
and cities, all of which causes you some pangs of 
conscience as you reflect how very much they are 
carrying home and how very little attention you 
have paid to improving your mind in foreign 
travel, and how few notes you have taken. 

Indeed, you pay so little regard even now, after 
you have reflected, that you make the whole jour- 
ney home without once having attended a ^ ' quiz, ' ' 
spending your time instead in idly looking at the 
water, gossiping with friends, listening to the 
singing of the prima donna down in the steerage, 
or playing a little at cards with half a dozen of 
the most delightful people in the world. 

There are a few distinguished figures on board, 
Mr. Townsend of Philadelphia, American minister 
to Belgium, coming home with his* wife and chil- 
dren for a three weeks' stay, having been absent 
almost continually for eight years. There is a 
Mr. Merryman, son of the beautiful woman whom 

1 60 



Perc Hyacinth, the brilliant Parisian priest, mar- 
ried a few years ago, and there's a reverend lather, 
who held the whole boat's company thrilled by 
his inspired lecture on Abraham Lincoln in the 
saloon one evening. 

The college boys, too, are getting home from 
their competitive games in London and Paris, the 
winner of the magnificent English sprinting cup 
limping with a strained ankle that lost him the 
victory in Paris in the Auteuil games on July 14th. 

At last the voyage nears its end. There's been 
rough weather, with winds and rains and dashing 
sea. Your own flippant suggestion that ' ' mal de 
mer is a myth ' * has been rebuked by a personal 
though brief attack of sea sickness. The pilot 
comes on • board, and with him letters, telegrams 
and papers from home. Later, the customs officers 
arrive and are lifted up the boat's side, and with 
their coming up many feminine hearts go down, 
and the multiplication table and half forgotten 
rules in percentage are brought forward to help 
out an estimate of what one really will have to 
pay if the officers prove inexorable and insist on 
having every bag opened and emptied out on the 
wharf. 

i6i 



You've gone from America to Antwerp, from 
Antwerp to Paris, from Paris to London and back 
to Antwerp, and have not once had a bag, trunk 
or package opened, but you have heard a thing or 
two about New York that makes you uncomfort- 
able, that and the official placard that has for days 
been posted in the saloon. 

It asks you to make a list of the things pur- 
chased in Europe and prices paid, and to have 
this nice little inventory all ready for the officers 
of customs when they come on board off Sandy 
Hook. You, however, think best to let the cus- 
tom house do its own bookkeeping and to take 
your chances when your turn comes for * * declar- 

ing." 

It's all over finally, yourself and yours are free 
to go your way, and you remember with a sigh the 
two and a half francs you paid for riding clear 
across Paris, on your arrival there, and the two 
and sixpence you paid for riding clear across 
London, — baggage included, — on your arrival 
there, as you pay the New York cabman three 
dollars to ride from the boat's landing to the Grand 
Central station, arriving there with just fifteen 
minutes in which to check your baggage and take 

162 



your seat in the train which brings you home next 
morning, with the sun shining and the whole 
country round about fresh washed with a midnight 
August rain for your welcome. You drive out 
Delaware Avenue, looking first from one window 
of your carriage and then the other, thinking, 
with peace in your heart, that you have seen 
nothing half so beautiful during all your travels. 



163 



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